Every so often you have a day. You know what I mean: the kind of day when you just wish you could go back to bed and call in sick to life. Then you read about someone who has had it way, way worse, and remind yourself that you’re being a baby and need to just grow up. So if you’re looking for one of those books to knock you back into the stratosphere, zinging a hole through your halo of self pity, here’s a great one.
I picked up the audiobook of Christina Baker Kline’s Orphan Train on the recommendation of my dad, and while it took me a little while to work my way into it, I generally enjoyed this unique story. I can’t say that I have any knowledge of these orphan trains, nor can I say that I’ve read a lot of realistic fiction stories about orphans in general, and was lured in by these “new” topics. On these points, the author demonstrates an impressive mastery, and does an even more impressive job of weaving in facts with the stories. As I read, I found I was also intrigued by the structure of the narrative: one story follows orphan Molly, a 17-year-old goth girl of Native American ancestry, and the second tells the story of Vivian and her experiences as an Irish immigrant turned orphan in the early 1900’s, ultimately shipped out of New York City to the mid-West on an orphan train.
The two narratives interweave and overlap fairly well. Molly meets the wealthy 90-something-year-old Vivian while completing a community service project after she’s caught trying to steal a copy of Jane Eyre from the local library. Her boyfriend’s mother works for Vivian and, despite her dislike of Molly, asks if Vivian would be willing to allow Molly to clean her attic for this community service project. (Of course, Vivian is kept out of the loop as to Molly’s thievery, believing that Molly is performing this chore as community service for school). Vivian of course agrees, and Molly embarks on her attic cleaning adventures.
Molly herself is understandably prickly, having been tossed about from one foster home after another. Her current home really isn’t much better, with her foster parents–Ralph and Dina–not the best fit for her, either. But as her hours of community service tick by, Molly recognizes Vivian ad more to her than just an old lady whose attic she’s cleaning; she realizes instead that Vivian has become a friend, a sympathetic familiar knowledgeable about the aches and pains of being an orphan bounced through the foster care system. It is through this bond that Molly learns of Vivian’s life and struggles, just as Vivian learns of Molly’s.
What I Liked:
Molly’s not a saint. She messes up (ok, maybe stealing a book from the library isn’t the worst thing she could have done, but it’s still not a good thing), she can be mean (defensive technique for survival), she can be deceitful (again, defensive), the list goes on. There’s something that just rings false when a protagonist is an infallible perpetual victim, and to avoid that, the author did a good job of giving Molly a personality. Could she have been given more of a personality? Definitely–but there’s at least something here to work with. In many ways, I thought she was a dead ringer for Matt, the goth girl too-old-for-foster-care but still-a-darned-good-though-misunderstood-student in Kathryn Erskine’s Quaking. (Yes, she’s that much of a stereotype).
I liked that Molly was biracial: again, as I’ve mentioned before, it’s great to see authors who are willing to present diverse characters. Her boyfriend is also biracial, though of a different background. Unfortunately, racial matters are not a large issue in the context of the book, though Molly’s Native ancestry is linked in limited ways to her perspective of the world, and as she proceeds through the story, it seems to become increasingly important to how she sees herself. However, her perspective on this identity, what it means to her, etc, is not explored, and her boyfriend barely even acknowledges his.
The story itself had a number of twists and turns. Some were pretty predictable, some were not, and it was this mixed blend that made the story interesting and kept the pages turning. It certainly painted a unique picture of the children subjected to this orphan train, as well as a parallel to the fate of foster care kids today.
What Wasn’t So Great:
Yes, there were twists and turns in the plot. But my, this story could be predictable. I’m not much of one to harp on this point–I prefer to lose myself in the narrative rather than focusing on what’s going to happen next–but even I had some difficulty with this.
Vivian’s younger self, although told in retrospect and thus perhaps being given the rose-colored lens treatment, is overly perfect. She seems to never do anything wrong; she never wants for anything above or beyond the most humble and meager of wants; she never complains about her place or her lot; she never engages in questionable behaviors; she is a good student who values education. I had some difficulty swallowing all of this, particularly in light of the number of challenges she faces in her life. I think a fault might have made her come to life more as a character. Though we here many references from the infamous Anne (of the Green Gables variety), Vivian’s way too good a kid to be similar, even if they share a hair color and lack of parents.
Dina, Molly’s current foster mom, is such a flat stereotype it’s alarming. Now, because I agree with the author’s “agenda” with the negative traits that she stereotypes in Dina (I’m pretty ultra liberal, and Dina’s perhaps the exact opposite), I wasn’t upset by her embodiment of these traits. The fact that Dina’s a living wicked stepmother, modernized and every bit as ugly as anything the Brothers Grimm dreamed up, did. In fact, that so many of the characters in the book–Dina being just one of them–are quite so one-dimensional bothered me quite a bit. And kind of bored me. And ultimately just frustrated me.
After such a lengthy blending of narratives, the ending comes quite suddenly, and rather quickly at that. It felt like one minute we were hearing about how weird old Vivian had a strange schedule and no relatives, and the next she’s accepting Molly as a long-term tenant in her house and surfing Youtube for panda videos. Oh, and her long lost daughter, but that’s just sort of thrown in there.
I also found the ending implausible: so Ralph and Dina were really just in it for the child support money? Really? And Molly and her boyfriend Jack just make up, no problems? And Vivian’s just willing to take in a 17-year-old she doesn’t really know and isn’t legally supposed to have? And Vivian’s daughter’s just totally cool with connecting with her birth mother who decides out of nowhere to contact her for the first time? Hm.
Final Thoughts:
Hm. Meh. I really enjoyed the historical aspect of this–that an author did the research and put together a compelling piece on such an otherwise unbelievable doing (the orphan train), while simultaneously trying to put a face on orphans today. Too bad, then, that this was so riddled with stereotypes. At the end of the day, I had trouble truly engaging in the characters and the one-dimensional nature of them made the story more predictable than it needed to be. As a result, it was a lot less interesting. It’s a good book, with a unique story to tell, but it’s not the best one out there.
What did you think? Anyone else out there pick this one up and have similar thoughts? Anyone else out there pick this one up and completely disagree?
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