[Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, Rochman is an American critic, editor, and nonfiction writer. In the following review, she favorably assesses Working Cotton.]

"The rows of cotton stretch as far as I can see." The voice is that of Shelan, a migrant child laborer in the cotton fields of central California, and the words hold both physical reality and bitter metaphor. [In Sherley Anne Williams' Working Cotton, which was illustrated by Carole Byard, she] tells of a long day of work with her family—from the cold smoky dawn to night. Byard's double-page acrylic paintings set the soft whiteness of the cotton crop against landscapes and portraits of glowing color, and the sense of beauty and space underlines the child's confinement. The text, based on Williams' Peacock Poems (a National Book Award nominee), is spare, colloquial, and immediate, a way of life concentrated in a single day. The family is warm, but friendship is fleeting when "you hardly ever see the same kids twice, 'specially after we moves to a new field." There's no self-pity or squalor, and no false nobility either, but rather a sense of bone-weariness and lost potential and no end in sight: "It's a long time to night." Williams says in a note that she drew on her childhood experience in the cotton fields of Fresno: her book speaks for children everywhere at work far from home. With its restrained, poetic text and impressionist paintings, this is a picture book for older readers, too.