Orphan Train is a specifically American story of mobility and rootlessness, highlighting a little-known but historically significant moment in our country’s past. Her life spans nearly a decade, encompassing great historical change and upheaval. This novel traces the journey of Vivian Day, a 91-year-old woman, from a small village in Ireland to the crowded streets of the Lower East Side to the wide-open expanses of the Midwest to the coast of Maine. For the first time, however, I undertook a project that required a huge amount of historical, cultural, and geographical research. Like my four previous novels, Orphan Train is about cultural identity and family history. And I am interested in the pervasive and insidious legacy of trauma: the way events beyond our control can shape and define our lives. I am intrigued by the spaces between words, the silences that conceal long-kept secrets, the complexities that lie beneath the surface. As they get to know each other, they find unlikely common ground and together are able to undo the emotional knots of their troubled pasts.Īs a novelist I’ve always been interested in how people tell the stories of their lives and what these stories reveal, intentionally or not, about who they are.

It’s the story of two women who build an unexpected friendship: a 91-year-old woman with a hidden past as an orphan-train rider and a troubled teen with one last chance at redemption. Set in present-day Maine and Depression-era Minnesota, Orphan Train highlights the real-life story of the trains that between 18 carried thousands of abandoned children from the East Coast to the Midwest. And this is kind of touchy-feely, but I hope they are inspired to think about their own lives and relationships. I hope readers come away with some thoughts about the human experience that hadn’t occurred to them before. It’s not until we speak up that we can move past the pain and step forward. I think that the main message of my novel is that shame and secrecy can keep us from becoming our full selves.

Many train riders were ashamed of this part of their past, and carried the secret of it for decades, and sometimes until they died.

In three sentences, how would you describe your book?.

What message would you like your readers to take away from Orphan Train?

Orphan Train is so beautifully written, and the characters are inspiring.

Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline