"A female steelworker's soulful portrait of industrial life. Goldbach's evocative prose paints a Dantean vision of the mill...but she discovers in the plant’s quirky, querulous employees an ethic of empathy and solidarity that bridges ideological divides. The result is an insightful and ultimately reassuring take on America’s working class."
—Publishers Weekly
"Bringing her perspective as an outsider—both as a woman and a liberal—to this insightful account of the steel worker's lot, Goldbach displays refreshing candor and hard-earned knowledge about the issues that divide us and the work that unites us."
—Booklist
"Goldbach turns in a gritty memoir of working in a steel mill while wrestling with the world beyond.... An affecting, unblinking portrait of working-class life."
—Kirkus Reviews
"There have been a lot of books written about life in industrial cities in the Midwest, but relatively few written by people who actually live in them, and few so heartfelt and unsparing. Rust is at once a unique memoir and a broad indictment of America's broken promise that anyone who came of age in the 21st century will find painfully familiar."
—Sarah Kendzior, New York Times bestselling author of The View from Flyover Country
"Beautiful."
—Charlie LeDuff, New York Times bestselling author of Detroit: An American Autopsy
"Rust is a soulful telling of America's stubborn and forgotten core. Deeply honest and defying easy sentimentality, this book heralds the arrival of a true talent."
— Adam Chandler, author of Drive-Thru Dreams
“Rust is a memoir of steel and grit, yes, but soul above all, a young Cleveland millworker’s eloquent tale of hard times that plants its boots squarely on the bookshelf of American working-class literature."
—David Giffels, author of Barnstorming Ohio: To Understand America and The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt
"Rust is a brave, heartfelt memoir whose pages overflow with hard-earned wisdom. Goldbach's story of embodying our national extremes--conservative vs progressive, religious vs secular, white collar vs blue--has endowed her with a singular ability to see through our partisan delusions and identify what, truly, unites us still as Americans. If your heart, like mine, feels poisoned by this era of political division, Rust may just be the antidote for which you've been searching."
—John Larison, author of an Entertainment Weekly Best Book Whiskey When We're Dry
“The steel mill burns on in the heart of Cleveland, and in the pages of Eliese Collette Goldbach’s transformative debut. This is indeed a memoir of steel and grit, the extraordinary work of every ordinary day. But like all great stories, Rust is also a love story—about a craft, a city, and the communities we forge there. Goldbach reminds us that what we make in turn makes us who and what we are.”
—Dave Lucas, author of Ohioana Book Award for Poetry winner Weather
"A Spring 2020 must-read... In the same vein as J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and other post-election literature, the strongest components of Goldbach’s memoir rest on the keen observations of life at the steel mill, specifically as a woman in a largely male environment; how the identity of laborers is consistently exploited by politicians; and the myriad ways households are divided by hyperbolic political rhetoric... Rust is a moving portrait of Goldbach's formative years, with gems of societal observation strewn throughout the narrative."
—Paperback Paris