Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline (2013)

At the Barnes and Nobles in Silver Spring, MD, where I hung out with my 16 year old goddaughter for an hour or more, I found a display shelf with 30 books that looked familiar. I had read at least 7 of them and know I had looked at or heard of many of the others. This felt like a shelf of my kind of reading. I pulled up a chair and read the blurbs on each one, making a list of ones I really would like to read, so I can look them up in my audio book store. This is the one I chose to buy. We librarians keep talking about liking the feel of a book in our hands, and this one felt strange. It was a floppy medium size paperback that I could curl back to hold with one hand, but at times it flopped strangely. The long edge of the open pages were rough cut - I remember some of the Latvian books at home came with uncut pages, and you had to slice them open with a knife before you could start reading the book. You could also tell if a book was never read, if it was still uncut. But these pages had the same feel as the ones we cut open ourselves. And then, though it is a paperback cover, it has flaps, which can work as book marks for the beginning and end, but seemed to get in the way more than help.

I remember reading another book - Rodzina by Karen Cushman (2003) -about orphan trains that brought orphaned children from cities out west, supposedly to find new families, but often worked hard as servants and sometimes took the young girls as child brides. Author Kline has done thorough research and found that people who had been sent out on these orphan trains have been contacting each other, organizing reunions, writing books. I appreciated her acknowledgements to all the places she had done her research, including the New York Public Library that had lists of orphaned children from the Children's Aid Society.

What drew me to this book was not just the orphan train story, since I had read one of those already, but how Kline tied that in with a foster child of today. Molly has to do community service (for trying to steal a copy of Jane Eyre from the library of all things) and ends up helping this rich old lady clean out her attic of memorabilia, and they find they have more in common than anyone would have realized.

I felt the Kline did a good job of conveying that total feeling of abandonment and loss felt by both the Irish immigrant girl Nimaha in 1929 and current day foster child Molly, and