Beginning ~ with a memory

"The dream is always simple. The memory never is.  It's an echo from 1903 when she was almost sixteen."

No, that didn't grab me, but a line half-way down the first page does:

"At twenty-five, Anna Klobuchar Clements would be known around the world as America's Joan of Arc.  Ten thousand miners would march behind her in a wildcat strike against the richest, most powerful copper company on earth."

The Women of the Copper Country ~ by Mary Doria Russell, 2019, fiction (Michigan)

In July 1913, twenty-five-year-old Annie Clements had seen enough of the world to know that it was unfair.  She's spent her whole life in the coal-mining town of Calumet, Michigan where men risk their lives for meager salaries — and had barely enough to put food on the table and clothes on their backs.  The women labor in the houses of the elite, and send their husbands and sons deep underground each day, dreading the fateful call of the company man telling them their loved ones aren't coming home.  When Annie decides to stand up for herself, and the entire town of Calumet, nearly everyone believes she may have taken on more than she is prepared to handle.

Gilion at Rose City Reader hosts Book Beginnings on Fridays. Click this link for more book beginnings.