Orphan Train: A Novel
by Christina Baker Kline
(HarperCollins, 2013)

As a Great Plains scholar, I have always been intrigued by the cultural phenomena of orphan trains, the altruistic (but naive) system created to provide western homes for eastern orphans. My current research into the history of Kearney County, Nebraska, piqued my interest even further when I came across an article in the July 11, 1907, edition of the Minden Courier announcing that the Children’s Aid Society of New York would be in town the following month with orphans between the ages of two and fourteen who would be needing homes. The orphans arrived on August 29, but there were only eight children and thirty-six applicants! All of the children were “placed out,” with one family taking two brothers, ages nine and eleven, but, sadly, another eleven year old brother, probably a twin, was chosen by another family, separating the siblings. Surprisingly, the names of the orphan children as well as the Minden and Axtell families who took the children were listed in the paper. History becomes more real and more compelling when it happens in one’s home town.

My next step was to do more research, so I read The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America, a scholarly, nonfiction work by Marilyn Irvin Holt and published by the University of Nebraska Press in 1992. I discovered that  the overpopulation of poor men, women, and, especially, children in urban centers, was overwhelming the state institutions, city and county poor farms, pauper jails, and orphanages. Even the private and charitable organizations could do little to alleviate the crisis. On the other hand, the rural western states were suffering from a labor shortage. Charles Loring Brace of New York City came up with a solution; sending poor children to the West would solve both problems. The reason children were selected for labor rather than adults was that reformers believed young children could be saved from their immoral environmental influences if removed before they were completely corrupted. As a result, Holt states that the Children’s Aid Society relocated over 200,000 children to homes in the West while many other charitable organizations followed Brace’s lead (3).

Indenturing or apprenticing young boys and girls had been long practiced in the United States. Even before Kansas became a state, the territorial legislature passed a law that allowed orphans and the “destitute” to be bound over as indentured servants. Although children were to be given the right to a basic education, if a girl or boy was killed in the process of “correcting” the child, as with slaveholding laws, the adults had the right to be acquitted (33).

Because of my interest in the subject, when Christina Baker Kline published Orphan Train: A Novel, I purchased it immediately. However, it perched on the top of on my pile of “to read” books until several neighbors decided to organize a book club, and I said, “I know exactly the book we should begin with!” Then, I worried, “What if no one likes it?” When one of my friends said that she had started it and could not put it down, I was relieved. When I began it, I could not put it down either and finished it in one day. The women in our book club also enjoyed it, and we had a long, lively, and interesting discussion about the novel.

Orphan Train is story of Molly Ayer, a seventeen-year-old girl with a Penobscot Indian father and a white mother, who is shuttled from one foster family to the next after her father is killed in a car wreck and her mother is incarcerated. Rebellious and unmoored, Molly isolates herself because she “knows from experience that tough and weird is preferable to pathetic and vulnerable, and she wears her Goth persona like armor” (4). When the librarian catches her stealing a ragged copy of Jane Eyre, she has to either spend time in “Juvie” or do community service. Her boyfriend, Jack, convinces her that she does not want a criminal record and finagles a job for her to help Vivian Daly, a rich, ninety-one-year-old woman, clean out her attic. The novel flashes back and forth between 2011, which focuses on Molly’s and Vivian’s present life, and 1929-1943, which flashes back to recount Vivian’s story.

Many connections begin to unite the young girl and the old lady. Both have necklaces that connect them to their lost families, both are orphaned at about the same age, both have dead fathers and mothers in public institutions, both are reluctant to reveal their pasts, and both experience heartache and rejection as they are reassigned from home to home, only wanted for what they can add to each family’s economics. They feel unloved and unwanted. Molly describes how both women emotionally shield themselves: “She has learned that she can control her emotions by thinking of her chest cavity as an enormous box with a chain lock. She opens the box and puts any stray, unmanageable feelings, any wayward sadness or regret, and clamps it shut” (8).

Vivian, born Niamh Power in Ireland, immigrates to the United States with her family in 1927 because of poverty and family disagreements, but they fare little better in New York City because of her father’s drinking. When a tenement fire kills her family, she is taken in by the Children’s Aid Society, who put her on the next train headed west. Because of her older age, nine, her red hair, and her Irish heritage, Niamh’s prospects do not look promising, but the matron tells her and the rest of the orphans, “They call this an orphan train, children, and you are lucky to be on it. You are leaving behind an evil place, full of ignorance, poverty, and vice, for the nobility of country life” (29). This reassurance is an ironic foreshadowing of what will await most of the children, especially Niamh and her new friend Hans, when they are placed out. Vivian’s story realistically parallels that of many orphans who are placed out in the West as she moves from one unhappy experience to another, her life much like the foster families that Molly has encountered.

Again, as with All the Light We Cannot See, what interested me most as a writer was the point of view and structure. Like Doerr, Kline chooses to narrate both stories simultaneously; however, she uses the third person in telling Molly’s story and the contemporary events, but she switches to first person in flashing back to Vivian’s childhood. Because both plot lines are occurring simultaneously in Doerr’s novel, he chooses to stick with third person for both protagonists. Perhaps the reason for this is that Doerr has two main characters while Kline focuses mostly on Vivian, using Molly as a vehicle to reveal the old lady’s past and connect her to the present. The book is ABOUT orphan train participants and their histories, not about the problems in today’s foster care system, although clearly Kline would like us to find parallels.

To keep the reader on track, Kline wisely dates each of the chapters as well as changing the points of view. She discusses this in an interview with Roxana Robinson in the “P.S.” afterward in my edition of the book. “The present day story in Orphan Train unfolds over several months and the historical section spans twenty-three years, from 1929-1943. It took some time to figure out how to balance the sections so that they complemented each other. . . It was complicated!” (7). As an author, I can appreciate the literary logistics required to weave the various plot threads together to make a coherent whole. It is complicated!

Orphan Train is a compelling read, well written, and historically accurate. The characters are well-drawn and empathetic, and readers will be content with the ending, which is much like Kent Haruf’s in Plainsong. In both novels, a new type of family prepares to join together over a home-cooked meal with the young female protagonist’s future still in question. As much as I enjoyed the book, however, I feel that Kline waited too long in the book to bring in the element of the oral history Molly collects from Vivian for her American History assignment. All along, I am wondering when Kline is going to connect the two narratives, to give the reader a reason for revealing Vivian’s story, but she only introduces this plot device about midpoint in the book. Although Molly is beginning to have a connection with the lady, “I like her. She’s kind of cool,” (128), she still doesn’t understand the importance of the memorabilia in the old lady’s attic while the reader already knows much of Vivian’s story. Perhaps Kline is keeping the story from Molly to show how Vivian has locked her feelings away, too, only hers are in boxes in the attic. Moreover, Molly only chooses Vivian as the subject of her report because she knows no one else and because “”she’s really, really old. . . . Maybe it will be a stretch to find drama in Vivian’s portage–a happy, stable life does not an interesting story make, right?” (132).  Irony again.

In the novel’s “Acknowledgements,” Kline credits a college assignment on portaging given by her own mother for a women’s studies class as “the missing strand needed to weave my book together” (277).  The interview questions are very appropriate for both Vivian’s and Molly’s lives: “What did you choose to bring with you to the next place? What did you leave behind? What insights did you gain about what’s important?” (130).  Although Kline does successfully integrate this theme into the details of the novel, it is just too contrived for me at this late point, too deus ex machina. I wish she would had worked it in more smoothly.

I think this novel would be very teachable for high school students and might be an excellent companion to an American History unit on immigration in America.