Orphan Train
Christina Baker Kline
2013, 273 pages
Fiction
The two main characters of this novel are Molly, a seventeen-year-old intelligent but troubled child of the foster care system, and Vivian, a 91-year-old widow living in a huge Victorian house on Mount Desert Island overlooking the ocean. How do they meet, why do they become friends, and what do they have in common? As a child Vivian was sent by the Children’s Aid Society on the orphan train from New York City to Minnesota where she became an indentured servant at the age of 9.
I found this novel, based on the historical fact of the orphan trains that ran from 1854 to 1929 transporting more than 200,000 orphaned, abandoned and homeless children to the Midwest for “adoption,” to be fascinating. Although not a product of the orphan trains, my own father was abandoned and homeless in 1924, placed in a school for neglected children, and then fostered into a farm family in 1929 at the age of 9 where he stayed until the age of 18. I couldn’t help but wonder if he or his siblings had similar feelings or experiences to the characters in this novel. Certainly he was as reticent about his childhood as Vivian has been about hers until she meets Molly. This is a story of unlocking repressed memories and feelings and making peace with the past.
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