A teenager in foster care in Maine ends up with community service because she stole a copy of Jane Eyre from the library. The female half of the couple she lives with, resents her and is only in it for the money while the husband is friendlier, but hen-pecked by his domineering bully of a wife.

The teenager (Molly) has a boyfriend and the boyfriend's mother arranges for her to have community service helping a woman in her 90's sort through her stuff.

It turns out that the woman, named Vivian, was an Irish immigrant in the 1920s and her family was destroyed by a fire in New York. Vivian was sent on an Orphan train - a program sending orphans out of the city to the country side to hopefully find families to adopt and care for them. What she found was a too common horror of abuse and neglect.

This is Vivian's story as told to Molly and how the two women come together to bond and make the future brighter for both.

The Orphan Train system really did exist in the height of the Depression. Hundreds of thousands of children were transported to horrors that are unimaginable today. But, what they faced was a picnic compared to what some faced at the hands of the Nazi's in Germany. It was a tough time.

anyone who wants to start to learn about what went on in this country before there was proper care for orphans.

Vivian and how she preservered.

does a fine job of storytelling, although I found the ending to be a bit abrupt. I wanted to know more about what would happen with Molly and Vivian.

it was a quick and entertaining reading experience. I read it in three days, after having spent six months reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

I read this on my Kindle. It went by fast and when I put it down, I couldn't wait for the Kindle to recharge so I could read some more. It was a page-turner.

Lately, I have found that books' endings are a bit wanting and that was the case here, although I found myself imagining what I would have done with the ending and that was sort of fun.

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Created Mar 14, 2015 at 9:53am • Submit your own review...