In turn, Vivian helps Molly both practically, with her community service hours and a school history project, and emotionally, by supporting her growing sense of identity. Molly helps Vivian heal from her traumatic past and reconnect with her still-living relatives. Through sharing their pasts, both women grow and change. In turn, Vivian has locked herself into a very small world her beautiful house is both a refuge and a prison, like Sleeping Beauty’s castle, frozen in time. By the time Molly arrives on Vivian’s doorstep, she seems to be on the wrong track in life. Molly’s life is marked by similarly tragic events-her father’s death and her mother’s drug addiction-which results in Molly being placed in foster care at age 8. Her early childhood is defined by poverty, hardship, and loss. Niamh Power ends up in a small town in Minnesota. She is sent to the Children’s Aid Society and she is subsequently put on an orphan train. Two years later, in 1929, a tragic fire kills her father and siblings and renders her mother incapable of caring for her.

Vivian, born Niamh Power in County Galway, Ireland, immigrates to the United States with her family when she is 7 years old. While they work, Vivian reminisces over the items that they find. Molly arrives to help Vivian reorganize and clean out her attic as part of community service hours she must perform to stay out of juvenile detention. The chapters move between the two storylines: Molly’s modern-day life and her developing relationship with Vivian, and Vivian’s past. Molly’s modern-day experience as a Penobscot Indian teenager stuck in the foster-care system forms the other, while the history and culture of the Penobscot Indians also figures prominently in the novel. Vivian’s life experience as an Irish immigrant and orphan train rider forms one track of the novel. Operating primarily as a historical novel, Orphan Train is grounded in the record of the trains that carried over 200,000 orphans from Eastern cities to new lives in the Midwest during the late-19th and early-20th centuries.

Orphan train kline