This young readers edition of Kelly’s Fight Like Hell (2022) is a historical journey through the Labor Movement in the United States, told through short biographies of many of its underrepresented activists. Starting with Sarah Bagley and her fight for the rights of mill workers in 1837 and culminating with Jennifer Bates’s struggle to unionize within Amazon’s warehouses in 2021, the entries are arranged chronologically, painting a compelling time line through life stories. An introduction featuring Bates and the effort to unionize in Alabama gives a brief overview of the Labor Movement as a whole, prepares readers for the giants they will meet in the text, and briefly discusses the author’s own experiences with unions. A conclusion wraps up the themes of the biographies and encourages readers to take the future of labor into their own hands and fight for change to create a better world. While most of the biographies focus on marginalized historical figures in the labor movement, a few have more tenuous ties. At over 300 pages, the book may seem daunting, and the profile format may feel somewhat repetitive if read straight through from start to finish, but each biography can easily be read on its own if desired. The ties between activists who lived at the same time are thoroughly explored. VERDICT Covering a wide swath of history through stories of fascinating people, this is a solid addition to collections serving middle grade and high school readers

– School Library Journal, 5/16/25

Rousing tales of courageous workers who dared to fight for better, safer jobs.

In this young readers’ version of Fight Like Hell (2022), Kelly leaves out the chapter on activist sex workers and recasts the rest into individual profiles of 22 organizers and advocates. Giants in the great struggle, like Frances Perkins, Mother Jones, Eugene V. Debs (who ran for president from prison in 1920), and Judy Heumann have entries, and she also includes more recent, lesser-known heroes. The subjects are diverse, including people of color, immigrants, and other people from marginalized groups. Kelly chronicles their triumphs and tragedies and their relentless battles with largely faceless, uniformly hostile bosses. Her rhetoric often takes a fiery turn: “I could feel the heat roll off her words,” she writes about an interview with Jennifer Bates, one of the leaders in a bitter, ongoing struggle against “Jeff Bezos’s goons” to unionize the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. Still, she reminds readers that her most iconic subjects were complex, fallible humans, acknowledging Bayard Rustin’s support for the war in Vietnam, for example, or how César Chávez and Dolores Huerta froze their longtime co-worker Maria Moreno out of the United Farm Workers. A passionate read that would pair well with J. Albert Mann’s Shift Happens (2024), Kelly’s central message shines through. “Collective working-class power is behind every step forward this country has made.”

Fiercely partisan, rich in role models. (source notes) (Nonfiction. 12-16)

– Kirkus, 4/1/25