This April, 1,127 people (most of them women) died in the collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh. In March 1911, 146 workers (most of them women) died when fire ripped through the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. The human cost of mass-produced clothing has been high since the dawn of industrialization. But while statistics alert us to global social concerns, fiction is capable of dramatizing  individual tragedies.

In Touched by Fire, Vancouver author Irene N. Watts places 15-year-old Miriam Markowitz on the eighth floor of the Triangle Factory that fateful spring afternoon. Miriam is at the end of her shift as a cuff setter when the fire breaks out. Watts lays out the elements that led to the tragedy: highly flammable paper patterns, overflowing scrap bins, locked exits, doors that open inward, empty fire hoses, flimsy fire-escape ladders. The fire itself, as seen through Miriam’s eyes, is terrifying. Watts ups the tension further when Miriam loses track of her best friend, Malka.

Taut writing pulls readers into the heart of the experience. Of the girls who jump from the ninth-floor windows, Miriam says, “I put my hands over my ears to shut out the sound of bodies landing on the pavement. They sound as though they are bundles of soiled laundry dropping on a kitchen floor.” The grimness continues later that night when Miriam goes to the morgue to help identify Malka’s body. Such deft reconstruction of an historical event is narratively appealing, but it is Miriam, and the context of her life, which gives the novel depth.

Using a specific historical incident presents challenges to the fiction writer. How can you keep the historical context from seeming like an elaborate setup? Watts’s solution is to bookend the factory fire with two others, creating a thematic throughline.

In the first chapter, Miriam recounts how the Cossacks burned down her home in Kiev when she was five years old. “I heard the neighing of the horses in terror in the barn. I remember the sound of their hooves, hammering, kicking against the stalls, as they tried to escape. Then the smell after the barn burned down, with the animals still inside.” Nightmares of this attack haunt her even after the family emigrates, first to Berlin and then America.

The second bookend is an epilogue, which flashes forward to 1933 Berlin. The point of view switches to Miriam’s nephew, Peter, who witnesses Nazi book burnings: “A voice yells, ‘When we’ve finished burning books, we’ll start on the Jews.’” Miriam travels to Germany to rescue Peter from the increasingly dangerous country, again placing her at the centre of the action while providing a broader portrait of the experiences of specific cultural groups and periods in history.

All of this material – Russian Jews under the Tsar, the Berlin ghetto, Ellis Island, labour history, the rise of Nazism – might overwhelm the story were it not for the close attention to detail. As the focus zooms in on small moments – like sipping tea through a sugar cube, the challenge of sewing buttonholes, the seaweed-stuffed mattresses onboard the immigrant ships, or the small boy who retreats into muteness after seeing his father shot – the reader experiences history from the inside out.

Miriam is an optimistic character, and she and her parents enthusiastically embrace the American dream. The narrative does not question this dream, notwithstanding the tragedy of the fire. As an adult, Miriam has a family, a home in Brooklyn, and a summer cottage in Maine.

However, two details hint at a darker side to the immigrant experience. Miriam’s younger brother Yuri is content in Berlin and refuses to continue on to the U.S. And on the ship, Miriam meets Rosie, an Italian girl going to New York to live with her brother and his wife. When the wife rejects her, Rosie finds herself alone at age 15, without a home, and forced to rely on her own resourcefulness.

Writers of historical fiction for young readers often find themselves pulled between two myths. In the myth of the bad old days, we congratulate ourselves on our enlightened modern attitudes toward racial equality and women’s rights. In the myth of the good old days, we celebrate a time when kids were free to act autonomously. Miriam’s story edges toward the good old days, painting a convincing portrait of resilience in the face of oppression. In an afterword we learn of new safety legislation brought about as a result of the Shirtwaist Fire. As the recent tragedy in Bangladesh demonstrates, the bad days are, sadly, still the reality for many.