Orphan Train (2013)

4.5 stars! Very good book gvien to me by my book-loving cousin, who has bought several copies! Haha. I didn't know about this part of American history and was sad to learn of these little people being given to people who may only have wanted a field hand or someone to work for them, with no intention of actually adopting them. Interesting story lines of long ago orphan from Ireland and then more modern character who is in the system herself. Good read! Thanks Kelly! ( )

This was pretty interesting, I'm definitely going to look for more info about orphan trains. ( )

Excellent, excellent, excellent. Told through two timelines, but they tie together seamlessly. We discover the older time line, from the elderly Vivian, who is recounting much of her (previously untold to anyone) history to struggling teenager Molly who is helping Vivian clean out her attic, as part of a community service program. Such an interesting time in history is revealed with tenderness and feeling. I love this book and plan to display it prominently on my bookshelf. ( )

What a fast read! That's not at all a comment on the quality, by the way--I just zipped through this one, for whatever reason.

I first saw this book on GoodReads, then found a bargain copy at a library sale. A god book that is definitely worth the read, though not earth-shattering. It'd be a good one to teach in high school, I think.

I couldn't put my finger on what it was about this book that kept me feeling just a little separated, but a colleague happened to hit the nail on the head while describing another book: It's very clearly the product of a creative writing professor. It's just a little too neat, too caught up in the deliberate style to really let loose and sink in. We need books like this--they show us all the wonderful things that writing and storytelling can be--but I didn't connect deeply.

That said, I definitely connected more to the modern main character than I did to the modern women in [b:The Joy Luck Club|7763|The Joy Luck Club|Amy Tan|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1304978653s/7763.jpg|1955658]. Molly felt more real, more down-to-earth--the fact that she wasn't the beautiful, misunderstood Bella Swan type helped a lot. She bickered with her boyfriend, but they made up. They talked about the ways they couldn't meet each other as equals and how that made them feel. You can see how she became the person she is, not magically a saint and not willfully antagonistic.

Normally my primary interest would be with Niamh ("Neev"), as today's problems rarely seem as dire as the problems of the past. But in this book, it was actually the points where past met present that held me most. Maybe it was just my nostalgia for my own oral history class. If I thought I could make a living off it, I would loved to be a field anthropologist, interviewing new and interesting people from all walks of life. But it could also be because I've often connected well with people considerably older than I am--so I felt a kind of kinship with Molly, even if the connections I make tend to be much slower to form.

Yeah, there were some places that strained the suspension of disbelief. Molly seems to think she'll go to juvie for stealing a library book. Really? Even in our messed-up racist society, that seems a bit extreme for someone with no previous record. Molly's foster mother is conveniently antagonistic for no apparent reason--everyone has to have motivation of some sort. And a 91-year-old woman learns how to use a computer in a matter of weeks despite the fact that the most advanced technology in her house is a cordless phone--not impossible, but incredibly unlikely.

For some reason, I'm more forgiving of the coincidences in the "past" part of the narrative. Is it because that feels more like full-on story to me? I do think I tend to be more critical of books set in the present or near-present.

And that's it, folks, because I'm quite tired this evening. I miss doing my quotes, but they really did take up a LOT of time.

Bookmark: Hufflepuff ( )

This book reads like a YA novel. It is funny that I read it right after I finished the Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and these two books couldn't be more different. Where the Russian tome is extremely long, thin on events and heavy on character dialogue, conversation and study, this one is short, and the "event" features as the main driver of the story while the characters are just serving as its results.

The history about the Orphan Train is interesting but I found the characters a bit on the exaggerated side. There are twin strands to the story. A modern-day young girl, who had a difficult childhood as a foster child and is close to ageing out of the foster care system. She faces some time of community work with an elderly lady, and an unlikely friendship develops when they discover the common threads that binds them. Vivian was also an orphan who arrived from the East Coast on the Orphan Train.

Some of the secondary characters were stereotypical, like the foster mother in the modern story. The last scenes in the book were something from a soap-opera. The writing is good but not spectacular. In all the story relies heavily on the drama of the orphan's life. The earlier years in Vivian's life (born Niamh in Galway Ireland) were most authentic and telling, and they alone carry the book.

One idea that I found interesting, is how people living in the worst of squalor found easy to look down and make racist comment on the poor little Irish girl. It is something that is difficult to understand logically, yet it always occurs in societies where the weak pries on the weaker and the weaker takes advantage of the weakest. ( )