Serendipity can be amazing. I picked up this young adult book as a break from listening to Hosseini's very heavy book - Thousand Splendid Suns and the reading of Eat, Pray, Love. I had forgotten that Cushman isn't afraid of tackling hardships in history, even if they are softened for the young reader. The story of Rodzina was intensified for me by the parallels I saw between her and the two women in Hosseini's Afghanistan. Rodzina is a 12 year old Polish girl in Chicago who's parents die and she is put in an orphanage, then taken on a train west to find a home for her. The loss in her is deep, and the dangers real - of being given away into servitude, maybe even slavery, or when one nasty guy plans to make her his wife. Mariam and Laila in Hosseini's book both lost their parents and were given away to a brutal man, but the war and surrounding culture made their lives so much more horrific. In the afterward we read that there really was a movement to get orphans out of cities and sent west, so that orphan trains were a real phenomenon.
I had originally picked up this book because it was historical fiction about East Europeans. The title Rodzina is strange, but apropos. The author explains she saw this on her great grandmother's grave and only later found out it wasn't her first name, but the word "family." So no girl would ever be named Family, but since this book is so much about families and belonging, I think it makes perfect sense.
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