Author: Christina Baker Kline
Pub Date: October 14, 2014
Rating: 6/10
In two sentences:
Vivian is a ninety year old woman who grew up going from family to family after arriving in the Midwest by an orphan train. Molly is a girl who has to do 50 hours of community service for trying to steal Jane Eyre.
My thoughts:
This book was recommended to me by my Grandma. She reads about a book a week, give or take so when she likes a book enough to buy a copy and lend it to me and then lend it to other people she knows I expect it’s going to be good.
Orphan Train is a historical fiction novel blended with a modern day story line. The plot goes between Molly and Vivian and tell both their stories. However, I don’t think it was executed very well. The switches between the two seemed sudden and of no relevance. Eventually Molly was doing a school project but it was never clear that was how we were getting Vivian’s story this entire time. Plus Vivian’s was in first person and Molly’s was in third. I don’t know why that bothered me so much but it did.
There wasn’t a sense of closeness between the two of them which made everything seem even more disjointed. In all it just seemed jumpy.
I loved Vivian’s story though. I think if it had been just her it would have been a marvelous novella, perhaps even more powerful as well, but for what it’s worth, I still stayed up an extra hour to finish it during Finals week. The last quarter is definitely the best.
While it’s not going to top any of my “Best Of” lists, (except historical fiction due to it most likely being the first one since seventh grade) I’m not saying it’s horrible. I looked forward to reading it and Vivian’s story made me cry, so you can’t really fault a book that does that, can you?
That's so sweet that your Grandma likes to read and lends you books! My mom and I used to do that a lot.
This has been on my to read list since before it even came out, but for some reason I never got around to it. It's a bummer about the transitions being so abrupt and the changing of the way they were narrated probably got a bit annoying…I know it bothers me when books do that.
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It was just one of those things that annoyed me more and more as I read on. My grandma has also told me to read Nineteen Minutes, The Boy in Striped Pajamas and The Pact, all of which I loved so this was just a rarity of me not liking it
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