Nonfiction by Stephanie Land.
Stephanie starts this book out in a homeless shelter with Mia, her toddler daughter; she's left Mia's abusive dad and has nowhere else to go. To be honest, the place she starts out in is way better than most homeless shelters I've come into contact with, but still, it's not where she wants to be. The next steps are far from easy for Stephanie.
This book chronicles her long crawl out of poverty and into a better life for herself and Mia. Stephanie explores the world of food stamps, WIC, transitional housing, section 8, childcare subsidies, and all other the helpful-but-demoralizing government social programs. It's exhausting. Most of her time and attention is on working as a house cleaner (hence the title) and she tells some good stories about the people she works for.
The main idea seems to be that hard work can only sometimes get you where you need to go. As social commentary, this story doesn't really work for me; however, it is a fairly honest memoir and interesting to read. It's better than Nickel and Dimed (on NOT Getting by in America), which got much more annoyingly political and was less personal.
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