Orphan Train Reviews

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2009/03/20/the-orphan-train/

Taking the 

Orphan Train 

   

Evelyn Smith

Ph. D. in English, Texas Christian University (1995)

M.S. in Library Science, University of North Texas (2012)

Orphan Train. (2013). Kline, Christina. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. 

Christina Kline uses a dual narrative to move along the plot in the coming of age novel, Orphan Train, as two women from seemingly dissimilar backgrounds find out that they have something to teach each other as they alternate telling their stories in either the first and third person.

Because Orphan Train has already become a  selection of public library book clubs, I’ve decided to  include not only a collection of reviews of this chick lit historical fiction hybrid, but I’ve also critiqued some Web sites that put the work in its historical context.  Finally, this Web page poses some additional discussion questions appropriate for both book club and high school or undergraduate-level class discussions since this  story is also a young adult novel.

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2009/03/20/the-orphan-train/
Children's Aid Society orphans lining up for review in the 1920s.

Orphan Train Directory Reviews & Interviews  Providing Historical Context Discussion Questions

  

Interview & Reviews

After tragedy, young girl shipped west on orphan train.  (2013, April 11).  NPR.  Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/2013/04/14/176920218/after-tragedy-young-girl-shipped-west-on-orphan-train

In this NPR interview, Christina Kline discusses the historical background for Orphan Train as NPR concentrates its energies on Kline’s historical research that lies behind her portrayal of a young Irish immigrant who is put aboard an Orphan Train going west from New York City, totally leaving out her post-modern counterparts’ struggle of trying to fit in while growing up in foster care (2013, April 11, para. 1-2). 

Kline delves into the history of the orphan trains as a social program established by a young minister, Charles Loring Brace, who took vagrant and unwanted children from New York’s tenements to the Midwest where their foster parents usually saw them as an unpaid source of child labor (2013, April 11, para. 3-4).   Prospective foster parents, however, often didn’t want to be entrusted with the care of adolescent girls because wives often saw them as a threat to their status; and once selected, girls were sometimes subject to sexual assault (Kline, 2013, April 11, para. 7).  According to Kline, Niamh, age nine at the beginning of her tale, has several strikes against her: she has a hard to pronounce foreign name as well as an accent, red hair, and a nominal Roman Catholic background (2013, April 11, para. 5).  At this point of the interview, perhaps thinking of Reverend Brace, Kline misspeaks when she notes that Niamh (a.k.a. Dorothy and Vivian) ended up attending a Methodist church (2013, April 11, para. 6) since when she goes to live with the Swedish Nielsens, she agrees to attend the Lutheran church (Kline, 2013, p. 188).

Kline notes that the most unusual fact that she learned when researching the orphan trees was that most of the children believed that their train was the only orphan tree headed west, which added to their social isolation (2013, April 11, para. 8).  Even through the survivors of the Orphan Train passage experienced a series of trials and hardships, like Niamh, they also  saw their experiences as a form of redemption, although writing about orphan trains as historical fiction allowed Kline to add a lot of stark details that she might not have included in a non-fiction work (2013, April 11, para. 9-10).

Boler, Jaime.  (2013, May 7).  Book review: Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline.  Retrieved from http://bookmagnet.wordpress.com/2013/05/07/book-review-orphan-train-by-christina-baker-kline/

Jaime Boler (2013, May 7) organizes her review around the symbolism of portaging, a survival technique employed by Wabanaki Indians as they decided which belongings they would take in their canoes as they traveled from one body of water to another—as well as a plot device that allows Molly Ayer, a 17-year-old member of the Pendoscot tribe, and Vivian Daly, an elderly Irish immigrant, to connect with each other through the form of a prolonged oral history assignment that Molly undertakes while helping Mrs. Daly clean her attic as a community service project (para. 1-2 & 9).  Each protagonist makes assumptions about the other—standoffish Goth versus wealthy senior citizen--even as others have made assumptions about them as they have endured parallel life journeys of hardship and physical, sexual, and emotional abuse (Boler, 2013, May 7, para. 3-7).  

Boler notes that Kline allows Molly the guarded perspective of a third-person narrator while Vivian’s story shifts to the first-person—a device that Boler believes “underscores the importance of Vivian’s narrative and gives her story more bearing (2013, May 7, para. 11). This dual narrative, according to Boler, allows Kline to focus her audience’s attention on the orphan trains that ran from 1854 to 1929 as along the way she imbues her novel with “inspiration and hope” (Boler, 2013, May 7, para. 12). 

Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline. (2013, May 6).  Book Addiction.  Retrieved from http://heatherlo.wordpress.com/2013/05/06/orphan-train-by-christina-baker-kline/

Orphan Train lives up to the 20-something Book Addiction blogger’s high expectations as her favorite kind of historical fiction since it teaches by situating characters within a believable historical context (Book Addiction, 2013, May 6, para. 5-7).  She thus feels a special connection with Molly; and as for Vivian, by the end of the novel, she wanted “to sneak inside the pages and hug her like she was my own grandmother” (Book Addiction, 2013, May 6, para. 7-8).  The reviewer concludes that Kline’s writing is simple but incredibly effective” and confesses that her only complaint is that she didn’t want the novel to end (Book Addiction, 2013, May 6, para. 9-10).

Book Diva review—Orphan Train.  (2013, May 7).  Book Diva’s Book Reviews and News.  Retrieved from http://bookdiva.wordpress.com/2013/05/07/book-diva-review-orphan-train/

The Book Diva commends Kline for certainly doing her research on the Orphan Train Movement as the novel’s plot line finds the Millennial co-protagonist fulfilling a community service project by helping a woman from the Greatest Generation clean her attic (2013, May 7, para. 1-2 & 10).  This reviewer and freshman composition and rhetoric professor, however, wonders about Book Diva’s use of Wikipedia as her source for establishing Orphan Train’s historical accuracy since no final editor checks individual entries for their validity, and so many other references to the orphan trains are available on the Web.

Even so, as a reader, Book Diva certainly grasps the dual narrative organization of the novel as this unlikely pair bond with each other by sharing their similar life stories: Vivian endured a Dickensian existence as an orphan used and abused for her unpaid labor during the Depression while Molly’s foster mother is only a foster parent because she wants the extra income keeping Molly furnishes her (Book Diva, 2013, May 7, para. 4-7).  Book Diva finds the characters “believable” the story line “brilliant, the writing “detailed”, and the scenes “realistic” (2013, May 7, para. 8-9).  

Katie O.  (2013, May 30.  Book review 35:  The Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline.  Book It.  Retrieved from http://hellokatieo.wordpress.com/2013/05/31/book-review-35-the-orphan-train-by-christina-baker-kline/

Katie O. finds Orphan Train “another quick easy cry fest”; but even so, she did enjoy the read that explored the parallels between a ward of the state, aged 17, and a woman in her 90s as the younger woman helps her elder connect with her past through technology (2013, May 30, para. 1-2).  Rebellious Molly matures as the story progresses while flashbacks tell Vivian’s story Katie O., 2013, May 30, para. 3-4). Katie wishes the entire story was about Vivian’s youth, and she recommends the novel to anyone interested in the history of adoption and foster care in the United States (2013, Nay 30, para. 4-5).

Orphan Train. (2013). Goodreads.  Retrieved from https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15818107-orphan-train?ac=1

Labeling Orphan Train Kline’s “most ambitious and powerful novel to date”, Goodreads applauds this coming-of-age page turner that juxtaposes the contemporary angst of a troubled adolescent girl on the cusp of “aging out of the child welfare system” against the memories of a 91-year-old orphan train rider (Goodreads, 2013, para. 1-3).  As both protagonists discover similarities in their past, they open up emotionally to others.  Accordingly, Goodreads bestows upon Orphan Train praise that reviewers seldom apply to chick lit, noting it is “rich in detail and epic in scope” (2013, para. 5). 

Orphan Tree (Kline)—book reviews. LitLovers. (2013). Retrieved from http://www.litlovers.com/reading-guides/13-fiction/9196-orphan-train-kline?start=2

LitLovers gives excerpts of favorable reviews praising Orphan Train from the New York Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Kirkus. 

Orphan Train. (2013, February 11).   Publishers Weekly. Retrieved from http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-06-195072-8

Publishers Weekly finds Kline’s Orphan Train “an absorbing new novel . . . about two women finding a sense of home. Chapters alternate between two narrators who grew up in foster care—17-year-old Molly Ayer, whose dad was a Native American, and 91-year-old Vivian Daly, an Irish immigrant who endured the horrors of  being farmed out to uncaring foster parents under the guise of charity during the Depression—in her tale told in first person. 

Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline.  (2013, May 6). Traveling with T.  Retrieved from http://travelingwitht.wordpress.com/2013/05/06/orphan-train-by-christina-baker-kline/

Traveling with T praises Orphan Train as “a story that will make the reader laugh, cry, and feel deeply touched” (2013, May 6, para. 5).  While a wealthy widow and a jaded high school student stuck in the foster care system superficially appear to have nothing in common, alternating points of view divulge that they share similar life stories (Traveling with T, 2013, May 6, para. 1-4).

Ott, Melinda. (2013, August 2).  Book review: “Orphan Train” by Christina Baker Kline.  West Metro: Mommy Reads. Retrieved from http://westmetromommy.blogspot.com/2013/08/book-review-orphan-train-by-christina.html

Ott first offers a plot summary of Orphan Train, moving between contemporary Maine and Depression-era Minnesota, and then offers her own thoughts:  She loves it and cannot put it down!  Additionally, Ott believes that setting Molly’s story against Vivian’s really gives the story teeth” (2013, August 2, para.1-3; 4 & 5).  Ott also finds this woman’s novel/historical fiction selection “poetic without being too sophisticated” even as she finds that “the pain inflected on the two girls” made it hard for her to read (2013, August 2, para. 6-7).

Ott likes Kline’s technique of incorporating references to Jane Eyre and Anne of Green Gables into the novel (2013, August 2, para. 8), making it very much a self-aware metafiction.   However, she faults Kline for equipping a ward of the state with a smart phone, thus employing a plot device that Ott believes is lacking in verisimilitude (2013, August 2, para. 9).  However, this isn’t such a stretch! Confiscated cell phones from students who are using them in class is very common in high school classes. Often these are the students who supposedly can’t afford to bring pens and paper to class or else forget to do so.

Ti.  (2013, April 23).  Review, tour, & giveaway: Orphan Train.  Book Chatter.  Retrieved from http://bookchatter.net/2013/04/23/review-tour-giveaway-orphan-train/

Summarizing Orphan Train in a single line, Ti, a technical writer, finds it “a story of resilience and survival (2013, April 23, para. 2). As for the rest of the story, Ti finds Vivian’s tale of woe much more likable than Molly’s, whose character “is difficult to like (Ti, 2013, April 23, para. 3).  Nevertheless, Ti enjoyed the interweaving of two narratives told in alternating chapters and set in two different eras even as she found the ending “a tad rushed” and “too contrived” (Ti, 2013, April 23, para. 5).  

Providing Historical Context

fineartamerica.com
C. L. Brace

Children’s Aid Society. (2013). Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930.  Harvard University Library Open Collection, Retrieved from http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/immigration/cas.html

The fate of immigrant children aroused both pity and fear on the part of social reformers like Charles Loring Brace, the founder of the Children’s Aid Society (CAS, 2013, para. 1).  Brace’s landmark Orphan Train philanthropy sent groups of orphaned or abandoned children by train across the country in a naïve attempt to place them in a more stable rural or small town environment.  However, the success of this program in retrospect remains difficult to evaluate since it often broke apart families and placed Irish, Italian or Jewish immigrant children with Protestant families, taking them away from their cultural heritage (CAS, 2013, para. para. 3-4). In tine, the Children’s Aid Society’s philosophy began to change as it started to place children locally and sought to oversee their foster care with greater diligence (CAS, 2013, para.5).

Di Pasquale, Connie. (1996). A history of the Orphan Trains.  Orphan Trains of Kansas.  Kansas Collection Articles.  Retrieved from http://www.kancoll.org/articles/orphans/or_hist.htm

Connie Di Pasquale (1966) provides a summary of the history of the Orphan Train Movement, although her dates and statistical details differ slightly than those provided by both Stephen O’Connor and Christina Baker Kline in her publicity (para. 1).  Di Pasquale also identifies Charles Loring Brace as a Congregationalist minister rather than as a Methodist as Kline states in her NPR interview. For the record, The Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society (2006), notes that Brace, a cousin to Harriet Beecher Stowe, was ordained a Congregationalist minister in 1849, although Harvard University Library’s Open Collection identifies him as a Methodist minister perhaps since Brace spent two years working at the Methodist mission in the New York Five Points District before he helped found the Children’s Aid Society (Encyclopedia of Children, 2006, para. 2 & 3; Children’s Aid Society, 2013, para. 2). Di Pasquale also emphasizes that Brace and his successors ideally placed children as full-fledged members of an adoptive family rather than contracting them into indentured servitude (1996, para. 3-4).  Both Brace’s Children’s Aid Society and the New York Foundling Hospital placed out children until 1930 when the Depression made it extremely difficult for families to feed and clothe these neglected children, and state foster care systems begin to replace orphan trains and orphanages (Di Pasquale, 1966, para. 9).

• See also: Brace, Charles Loring (1826-1890).  (2006). Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society.  Retrieved from http://www.faqs.org/childhood/Bo-Ch/Brace-Charles-Loring-1826-1890.html

Guide to the records of the Children’s Aid Society: 1836-2006.  (2009). The New York Historical Society.  Retrieved from http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/nyhs/childrensaidsociety_at.html

Founded in 1853, the Children’s Aid Society raised substantial funds from both the public and the Roosevelt, Astor, and Dodge families, and from 1853 to 1929 its Emigration Department, which was also known as the Placing Out and Foster Home Department,  placed orphaned and neglected children primarily with farm families all over the United States. Foster parents usually agreed to treat children as family members, allowing them to attend school in return for their unpaid labor.  While some children, like the baby Carmine, were formally adopted, older boys, like Dutchy, were “sent out as paid laborers” (New York Historical Society, 2009, para. 1-2).  These orphans were more often than not children whose  birth families released to the care of the Children’s Aid Society or else adolescents with no known guardians (New York Historical Society, 2009, para. 3). 

Herndon, Ruth Wallis. (2001, June 10).  Keep ’em movin. Books.  New York Times.  Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/06/10/reviews/010610.10herndot.html

Ruth Herndon’s review of Stephen O’Connor’s Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed (2001), commends this non-fiction work to those readers who want to know more about Orphan Train children. Brace was a Connecticut-born minister and reformer, whose charity, the Children’s Aid Society, relocated 250,000 orphaned, abandoned and runaway children from 1853 to 1920 from the slums of New York City to the Midwest (2001, June 10, para. 1).  In doing so, he drew upon an already established system of indentured servitude and a German scheme that placed these throw away children in residential schools as alternatives to life on the streets.  Nevertheless, as O’Connor’s subtitle indicates, while the Orphan Trains saved some children, parceling out children to rural and small town foster parents condemned others to a life of drudgery, trauma, and abuse.  Criticism of this system of farming out orphan and neglected children eventually led reformers to switch to the present scheme that prefers to keep children whenever possible with their birth families (Herndon, 2001, June 10, para. 2).

Herndon commends O’Connor for cobbling together the lives of these children by accessing both institutional reports and the fictional re-accounting of their lives that appeared in Children’s Aid Society publications (2001, June 10, para. 3).  However, Herndon also laments that O’Connor focuses on Brace’s biography and writings rather than on the children (2001, June 10, para. 4-5).  She also condemns O’Connor’s research with faint praise, noting that “his sources are not always apparent” (Herndon, 2001, June 10, para. 6).  Herndon nevertheless notes that O’Connor aptly ends his book by adding some needed retrospection as he focuses on present-day child welfare policies (2001, June 10, para. 7). 

• A memorable and thought-provoking prologue to O’Connor’s Orphan Trains accompanies Herndon’s review: http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/o/oconnor-01orphan.html

The Orphan Trains. (2009). The American Experience.  PBS.  Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/orphan/

In 1853, the Reverend Charles Loring Brace, a minister from a prominent Connecticut family, founded the Children’s Aid Society, whose main purpose was to farm out the “street Arabs” of New York to rural America (American Experience, 2009, para. 4). Although the CAS was likely to point out its successes; for example, a governor of North Dakota and a governor of Alaska, respectively, were often Orphan Train riders, the haphazard  placement of children with foster families had a mixed record (American Experience, 2009, para. 10).

The Orphan Trains. (n.d.). The Children’s Aid Society.  Retrieved from http://www.childrensaidsociety.org/about/history/orphan-trains

The Children’s Aid Society maintains that between 1853 and 1929 it placed 120,000 children between the ages of six and 18 with “morally upright Christian families” throughout the United States, and it credits the Orphan Train movement with the beginnings of the foster care movement (CAS, n.d., para. 1-3).  The last generation of Orphan Train riders still keeps in touch through the National Orphan Train Complex (CAS, n. s., para. 7). 

Discussion Questions

Although Christina Kline furnishes a thoughtful list of questions to spark group conversations, an analysis of the novel comes up with several others:

1)      Explain how foreshadowing in the  prologue either detracts from the novel’s suspense, or how it furnishes a helpful outline for Kline’s audience to refer back to while reading.

2)       Why does Kline not add any more details about Vivian’s marriage to Jim Daly for more than fifty years?

3)      How do the repeated references to Anne of Green Gables and Jane Eyre make The Orphan Train an example the self-aware, post-modern literary device known as metafiction and the figure of the speech known as mise-en-abyme?

• Mise-en-abyme. (2006). The Literary Encyclopedia. Retrieved from http://litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=729

• Theories of metafiction. (n. d.).  Retrieved from http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary_Criticism/postmodernism/metafiction.htm

4)     Is portage an appropriate metaphor that encompasses both Vivian and Molly’s experiences; or alternatively, is it a cumbersome reach made appropriate only by Molly’s Native American heritage?  In other words, does attributing too many shared parallel circumstances to both women come off as a contrived literary device?  Cite several examples to explain your viewpoint.

5)      Social historians have criticized the Children’s Aid Society’s practice of placing Roman Catholic children with Protestant families while 19^th-and early 20^th-century social reformers saw these placements as an important part of integrating immigrant children into the American melting pot.  How does Kline-Baker work this criticism into the novel?  Is Kline’s depiction of this a little forced given the Powers family’s nominal Roman Catholicism? 

6)      Why or why not does the happy ending of The Orphan Train ring true?

7)      Make a list of the stereotypes Orphan Train mentions; for example, when Vivian marries Dutchy, the characters frequently comment that musicians, and presumably other creative, artistic types are disorganized and not very good at math while  making Molly and Vivian’s dads alcoholics perpetuates Irish and Native American stereotypes.

8)      How do external changes in makeup and dress symbolize the internal changes Molly and Vivian go through as they adapt to what others expect of them?

________________________

“Please Sir, I want some more.”

      Molly is a fan of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eye (1847), and Vivian loves Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908)—both of which suggest the start of a reading jag of novels whose main protagonist is an orphan. For example, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1838) immediately come to mind.  Moreover, there’s a link for that:

      Best books about orphans.  (2013). Goodreads.  Retrieved from http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/16028.Best_Books_About_Orphans_