Christina Baker Kline - Orphan Train



Between 1853 and 1929, 250,000 orphaned, abandoned or homeless children were transported on trains from urban centres in the U.S. to foster homes in rural areas of the midwest as part of a questionable welfare initiative. The founders of the orphan train program aimed to eradicate the existing system of institutional care which they believed stunted, rather than supported, children, and instead place them with families. It was what led to today's system of organised foster care. Unfortunately, the orphan train movement was insufficiently regulated and deeply flawed, and the families who sought to adopt children from the trains were often seeking free child labour, or worse, rather than a child to love and call their own.

This is the extraordinary history Christina Baker Kline draws on for her novel. Sadly it is a mediocre book, one that might have been better suited for a young adult audience, and Baker Kline fails to depict the fascinating phenomenon of the trains in sufficient depth to educate or enlighten a reader.

This was the first book chosen for the 2014 reading year of my Canadian bookclub. We sat down over dinner one night in February and mapped out our books for the year, a feat involving creative organisation, entertaining debate and numerous voting rounds. Most of the women enjoyed the novel well enough, and I admit that I was its harshest critic.  But my pet reading peeve is poor writing, and Baker Kline's writing is weak. By 'poor' or 'weak' writing I mean that the obvious is frequently stated, metaphors are drawn that don't really work, and events that should rightfully be shown are told, even glossed over.

Orphan Train tells the story of Molly, a 17 year old foster-child in modern-day Maine, who is sentenced to community service for stealing a library book, and Vivian, the woman to whose service Molly commits. It soon turns out that Molly and Vivian have much in common, Vivian having been orphaned at a young age. Vivian, of course, was one of the children shipped away from New York on an orphan train, and her tale of being tossed from foster home to foster home in rural Minnesota is appropriately bleak. The narration moves from Vivian's story to Molly's and back again, gradually revealing the secrets of Vivian's past as Molly's future becomes clear. Unfortunately Molly's story is less nuanced and far less interesting than Vivian's and it is hard to know why Baker Kline felt the need to tell the more interesting story of Vivian's life through this contemporary lense. Again, it feels as though she is using Molly to appeal to a younger generation of readers. If the book had been marketed as YA, I might have approached it differently, but for an adult novel it comes across as sappy and sentimental and a little condesending.

Nevertheless, I'm glad I read this and I'm glad to have learnt a little about the orphan trains, even if most of what I actually learnt came in researching around the novel rather than from the novel itself. For those of you looking for a light diversion, this may well be it - it has the feel of chick lit at times, especially in the latter half of Vivian's story, which is happier than her orphan train beginnings, and Baker Kline does succeed in getting her readers to keep turning the pages. All of the women in my book club were agreed that the novel became rather addictive in the second half, in the same way that a romance does when one is wondering who the heroine will end up marrying.

Overall assessment: 2.5 out of 5.