Let's Bust a Recap : Orphan Train

Happy Thursday, and wow! is May really over already? I mean, I know we still have tomorrow, but didn't we just ring in 2019 like, 2 seconds ago? Now we're almost halfway through the year?? At the pace I'm going, I've started to feel like I may have bit off more than I can chew with my book list this year, and the #bookstagram people are not helping. Did y'all know there are people who read like, 50 books a month? I mean, how? But let's skip my completely unnecessary anxiety over meeting my totally self-imposed reading goals and just get straight to the recap. 

The second book I read on our Hawaiian vacation (which I promise I will get around to blogging about someday) was Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline. This book was published not so long ago (considering that a lot of the books I read and post about are much older) at the beginning of 2013, and I picked it up at The Book Shelter in December because my friend Karsch recommended it to me. Consequently, I chose this book to fill the "book recommended by someone with great taste" category for the 2019 Modern Mrs Darcy Reading Challenge which is the second category I've been able to tick off so far this year (the first being "three books by the same author"—thank you, Harry Potter series). 

Orphan Train moves back and forth between contemporary Maine and Depression-era Minnesota, linking 17-year-old foster kid Molly Ayer to 91-year-old Irish immigrant Vivian Daly as Molly helps Vivian clean out her attic for a community service project designed to keep Molly out of juvie. As Molly learns about Vivian's past, she discovers just how much they have in common. 

The historical aspects of this novel were fascinating as Kline highlighted the little known phenomenon of the orphan trains that were operational in the U.S. from 1854 to 1929, relocating approximately 200,000 orphaned, abandoned, abused, or homeless children from overcrowded cities along the east coast to more rural areas in the American Midwest. 

I was also intrigued by the way Kline wove together the unlikely topics of foster care, Native American culture, immigration, and the progress of technology and how it has affected our world. She connected people, places, events, and worldviews that I would never have expected to read about all in one novel, but she did it well. Everything was well-researched, interesting, believable, and highly readable. 

However, there were some pretty big negative elements in this novel for me. The first being regular profanity. While it's not unrealistic for 17 year olds to have the vocabulary of sailors on leave, I personally don't like seeing four letter words popping up all over the pages of the novel I'm reading. Secondly, there was one somewhat graphic scene of a 10 year old girl being molested that made me feel physically ill. By the time I had gotten to that point in the book, I was wondering why on earth my friend ever recommended this book to me. It seemed vulgar and depressing and like there was no light at the end of a very dark story.

BUT the ending was worth the read. The way Kline concluded this heartbreaking narrative had me in tears—the happy kind. If you can get over some foul language and foul situations, I would recommend Orphan Train. 

So tell me, what are some hard novels that were worth the payout for you?