Orphan Train

My book club read Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline. Most of the group liked it more than I did.  I found the story to be too sad. I guess orphans are a sad subject to write about.  During the depression, immigrant orphans were gathered up from institutions and from the streets, put on a train, and sold to farm families in the Midwest.  In this story a young girl from Ireland looses her family in a fire and is put on the train.  She is supposed to be a part of a family and should be allowed to go to school.  Instead she is sold to a couple who run a sewing business.  They put her to work.  She sleeps in the hallway on a rug. And this isn't the worst place she get assigned to.  Eventually she makes her way to a decent family who takes her in but she is marred by her experiences.  As an old woman she lives alone in a mansion on the east coast.  A young goth orphaned teen comes to her house to complete some community service.  The teen helps the old woman heal from her experiences and in turn she helps the teen cope.  As we were talking we started comparing the plight of orphans then and now.  I'm not sure kids have it any better now than they did then.  There are always people who want to profit from a child instead of taking them under the wing and allowing them to be children while they're still young.  My mind wandered off during the discussion to my own grandmother.  When barely a teen her mother died.  Her father wanted to remarry.  His new wife accepted the two youngest children as her own but the older ones were farmed out.  My grandmother was sent to White Bear Lake to work in a cafe.  So basically she was orphaned while her father was still alive which is worse than being truly orphaned.  There is a lot of sadness in this world and sometimes I'm just not in the mood to dwell on it.