Book #58: Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline

I read this book in about two hours last night. It was burning a hole on my nightstand for the last few weeks, and I only have it because I promised to pass it along to my aunt when we see her on Sunday, and I really wanted to read it before we did. My cousin Brittney said that she really loved this book, and I'm glad I read it. The book tells the story of Niamh, later called Dorothy, and then Vivian, who is orphaned and left alone after a fire kills most of her family in New York City in 1929. She's taken in by the Children's Aid Society, which sends her and hundreds of other orphans out west on a train to be hopefully taken in by a family there. As we learn about Niamh's journey in the 20s and 30s, there's also a parallel story about Molly, a seventeen-year-old foster care kid who is assigned fifty hours of community service for trying to steal a library book. She ends up being assigned to help Vivian, now age 91, clean out her attic--and despite her best efforts, they begin to find out the similarities in their difficult childhoods and to make a bond with each other.

The part of the story that I liked best was the present-day storyline, with Molly and old-lady Vivian cleaning out her attic together. I of course thought that the 20s orphan train storyline was interesting, but it was so dang depressing. How awful for a nine-year-old girl to be orphaned, not cared for by anyone in the world, sent on a train to Minnesota, and then taken in by several successive families who just try to abuse her and don't care for her at all. I know that is real, and that sort of thing really did happen, and that people really had and have such terrible lives--but sometimes I don't love reading about things that are so depressing. Even though it ended up well, with her getting taken in by a kind couple and falling in love and getting married. I felt like her love story felt a little contrived--she randomly finds a boy that she met on the orphan train and they fall in love and get married, until he gets killed in WWII and basically ruins her life. So even that was a little depressing. Everything seemed to fall a little too nicely into place in the modern-day storyline too, with everyone becoming just one big happy family so easily. Those are my only complains about it. It was really interesting reading about this period and episode of history that I never knew all that much about.