278 pages - Trade Paperback - Historical Fiction - 2013
I was invited to join a book club and the person who started it picked this book as the first read. The story setting is set close to where I grew up in MN. I have also had an interest in the Depression era of the United States and seeing how people handled it.
The book has two timelines. The first part is set in Maine in modern times. We meet a young lady, Molly, who is in a foster program. Her foster father wants to be a family, but the mother is rude and unwilling to compromise. Molly is caught stealing a book from the local library and sentenced to community service. She finds herself helping Vivian. An older lady that needs help cleaning out her attic. As the work together "cleaning" the attic, they come upon all the items Vivian has collected through the years.
The second part of the story follows is set in the depression era. Naimh, has come over from ireland only 2 years ago. Both parents die and she and her brother, Carmine, are sent on the Orphan Train across the US. They travel with her friend, Dutchy. What happened on the Orphan Trains was they took children in New York and put them on trains that would stop at places in the midwest. Any family willing to take them in was encouraged to do so. Naimh is split from her brother and Dutchy, but they swear they will find each other in the future.
It becomes apparent that Vivian and Naimh are the same person and that she has changed her name. We follow her through many trials. It seems almost as if she goes from one bad things to another with only a glimmer of hope once and awhile. The book pulls itself together in the end with Molly helping Vivian deal with her past.
This book was interesting to me. There were parts of it I liked a lot. Specifically, the story of Vivian as a young lady and how things start out with her after being on the Orphan Train. But as the story went on I got a bit annoyed with the book. It seemed to me like it wasn't real. As if Kline made a list of all the terrible things that could happen to a young woman and then wrote it into the story. After reading the book I read an interview with Kline. She interviewed many people that actually did ride the Orphan Trains and reveals that she took parts of the people's stories and used them to tell Vivian's story. It wasn't that someone couldn't have had all those things happen to her, but it seemed very contrived. It was like to much was happening to one person.
3 Emotional/Intellectual - I really got into Vivian's story as a youth. I understood the point of having Molly be a character that leads Vivian into the future, but her part of the story mostly pointless to me and could have been handled in a different way.
2 Style/Readability - As mentioned, the story seemed way too contrived. I can't place my finger on it, but it just didn't seem real to me. I realize it is fiction, but it is historically accurate so I wanted something more.
2 Long Term Impact - It is a bestseller and it has positively drawn attention to folks who really did ride the trains. I would like to believe that some of their real stories would be more worthwhile.
7 out of 13. This isn't a great score. The thing is I liked the book and enjoyed reading it. I don't have another book that deals with the same subject, but I would like to believe there is something better. Personally, I wouldn't recommend it unless a person had connections to it, as in my case, where the setting was in my home state.
Keep Turning Pages.
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