The Annie McLeod Experience is an innovative trip that tells the story of the ghost of a mill-girl as she goes back in time to the days of the working mill.
It illuminates the lives of a number of compelling individuals, like former Lowell mill-girl Susan Parson Brown who lived with a diverse group of boarders in Boston and seemed to consider the other residents part of her "family." She ultimately married a fellow boarder and then opened a boardinghouse of her own.
The book begins as the teenage Sabra arrives in Lowell to begin her mill-girl career; it follows her through her common-law marriage--to a young idealist, a believer in American dreams who dies while mining gold in California--and the births and teenage years of her two children.