Saturday's Child

Saturday's Child captures the particular hunger of young women in 1914 San Francisco who want more than the world has offered them. Susan Brown and her colleagues labor in the back offices of a wholesale drug company, grinding through tedious tasks while harboring ambitions their society insists are unseemly for women. When a promotion opportunity emerges and a charismatic new colleague arrives, Susan must navigate the treacherous waters between what she wants professionally and what the world will permit her to want personally. Norris writes with sharp observation about the small hierarchies of office life, the way women band together against tedium and small cruelties, and the particular ache of ambition when society has already determined your ceiling. This is early twentieth-century women's fiction that refuses sentimentality in favor of something more honest: the specific, unromantic hunger to matter, to rise, to be seen as more than a pleasant girl in a dull office.