Orphan Train

characters have dead fathers and institutionalized mothers, both were
     passed from home to home and encountered prejudice because of cultural stereotypes,
     both held on to talismanic keepsakes from family members—they are psychologically
     similar. For both of them, change has been a defining principle; from a young age,
     they both had to learn to adapt, to inhabit new identities. They’ve spent much of
     their lives minimizing risk, avoiding complicated entanglements, and keeping silent
     about the past. It’s not until Vivian—in answer to Molly’s pointed questions—begins
     to face the truth about what happened long ago that both of them have the courage
     to make changes in their lives.
    RR: Can you talk about your own feelings of connection to Maine, a place you use often
     in your work?
    CBK: Though both of my parents are Southern, we moved to Maine when I was six years old
     and never looked back. I’m not naïve enough to consider myself a Mainer—though two
     of my younger sisters might be able to, having been born in-state (Mainers tend to
     be inconsistent on this subject)—but I did spend my formative years in Bangor, a mid-Maine
     town of thirty-five thousand on the Penobscot River. About a decade ago my parents
     retired to Bass Harbor, a tiny coastal village on Mount Desert Island. My three sisters
     have houses within two miles of my parents’ home, and one lives there with her family
     year-round. I am lucky enough to spend summers and other vacations on the island;
     my three boys consider it their homeland. For me, it’s as simple as this: Maine is
     a part of who I am.
    RR: Can you talk about the presence of time in this book, the way you use it to define
     and expand?
    CBK: The present-day story in Orphan Train unfolds over several months and the historical section spans twenty-three years,
     from 1929 to 1943. It took some time to figure out how to balance the sections so
     that they complemented and enhanced each other.
    Too often, when I’m reading novels with separate storylines, I find that I prefer
     one over the other and am impatient to return to the one I like. I tried to avoid
     this with Orphan Train by weaving the stories together so that they contained echoes of, and references
     to, each other—for example, Vivian’s grandmother gives her a Claddagh necklace in
     one section, and then pages later Molly comments on the necklace in the present-day
     story. But I didn’t want the references to be too literal or overt. It was complicated!
     I also wanted the historical section to end abruptly with a surprising revelation
     (which I won’t give away here), and for the present-day story to pick up where it
     left off, laying bare the mechanics of the storytelling: that Vivian is telling Molly
     her story in the present day. Sometimes I gave myself a headache trying to figure
     out how it all fit together. More than once, my editor, thank goodness, came in and
     saved the day.

 
     
    A Short History of the Real Orphan Trains
    O RPHAN T RAIN is a specifically American story of mobility and rootlessness, highlighting a little-known
     but historically significant moment in our country’s past. Between 1854 and 1929,
     so-called orphan trains transported more than two hundred thousand orphaned, abandoned,
     and homeless children—many of whom, like the character in this book, were first-generation
     Irish Catholic immigrants—from the coastal cities of the eastern United States to
     the Midwest for “adoption,” which often turned out to be indentured servitude. Charles
     Loring Brace, who founded the program, believed that hard work, education, and firm
     but compassionate childrearing—not to mention midwestern Christian family values—were
     the only way to save these children from a life of depravity and poverty. Until the
     1930s, there was no social safety net; it is estimated that more than ten thousand
     children were living on the streets of New York City at any given time.

    Photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog,
     Lewis Wickes Hines Collection of the National Child Labor Committee.
    Elizabeth Street in New York City, where Niamh lived, in the early twentieth century .

    Photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog,
     Lewis Wickes Hines Collection of the National Child Labor Committee.
    A bootblack like Dutchy, near City Hall Park, New York City, 1924.

    Photograph