Orphan Train By Christina Baker Kline

Orphan Train

The New York Times bestseller story of Orphan Train, written by Christina Baker Kline, follows the experiences of the main character, Molly, a girl who wears a gothic mask to escape conflict with her classmates. The opening of the story sets up Molly as a social outcast and a nomad since she became an orphan, after her dad died in a car crash and her mother fell to drug addiction. Molly is a troubled foster child in Maine who is about to “age out” of the system (that is, she's becoming too old for the system to continue accommodating). Molly’s experiences with others as the plot develops helps progress the main theme of Orphan Train: The bond made between Molly and the old lady Vivian within the story help them overcome challenges

However, that is how the relationship is since Dina refuses to acknowledge Molly’s wants and beliefs. Molly recognizes that every topic Dina and her talk about is always dominated by Dina’s overwhelming opinion, even on dinner choices, she continually forced to eat foods with meat in them “... because Dina refuses to recognize she is vegetarian”(Kline 48) and Molly is forced to eat mixed dishes such as lasagna and thus would eat very little. This tension prompts that Molly is never at ease in her foster home since she is always clashing with Dina on a regular basis, it doesn’t help that Molly’s values are quite liberal and Dina is a conservative at

When she is kicked out of her foster home by the cruel Dina, Molly is taken in by Vivian, who eventually allows Molly to interview her as part of her work on an American history assignment for her school. Molly also introduces Vivian to the Internet and encourages her to seek out her long-lost daughter. At the end of the novel, Vivian has an in-person encounter with that daughter that she has so long left behind: Sarah Dunnell, who is sixty-nine and a musician, just like her father, Dutchy. That encounter, the narrative suggests, would never have taken place if Vivian and Molly, initially wary of other people in general and of each other in particular, had not let down their defenses and been vulnerable with themselves and each