'Orphan Train' named Philly's One Book

 The book chosen for the 2015 One Book, One Philadelphia program is the 2013 novel Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline.

To be announced by the Free Library of Philadelphia and the Mayor's Office on Thursday morning, Orphan Train will be the focus of more than 100 art installations, films, performances, discussion groups, and other activities in schools throughout the city.

The middle-grade book for 2015 is Rodzina by Karen Cushman, and the children's book is Locomotive by Brian Floca. Besides circulating thousands of copies to the schools, the Free Library will have the books available to borrowers via hard copy, e-reader, or download.

This will be the 13th go-round for One Book, One Philadelphia, meant, as the Free Library website puts it, to "encourage the entire greater Philadelphia area to come together through reading and discussing a single book." The big kickoff is on Jan. 22, at the Free Library, with a musical performance by Curtis Institute student TJ Cole, inspired by the novel. One Book runs through March 19.

"It's a huge surprise, very exciting, a big honor, and a very big, big deal," said Kline from Austin, Texas, where she is doing a reading tour. "It tells a story many people don't know about - I certainly didn't - a story hidden in plain sight in our history."

Orphan Train is grounded in a heartbreaking story. From 1854 to 1929, more than 200,000 dispossessed children (homeless, orphaned, or abandoned), many from recently arrived Irish Catholic immigrant families, were put on trains that carried them from East Coast cities to Midwestern communities. There, these children were adopted - which often meant a life of more or less forced labor - by working-class and farming families.

The narrator of Orphan Train is Vivian Daly, born Niamh Power in a small Irish village, uprooted from there to New York City, and at last put on a train for the Midwest.

Now 91, Vivian meets Molly Ayer, 17, a Penobscot Indian woman who has grown up in foster care. (Vivian is intrigued by the tribal charms Molly wears, Molly by the claddagh cross necklace around Vivian's neck.) For the first time, Vivian tells her story to someone else. Both know the life of the rootless and unwanted. For both, identity is the big question.

Identity is a recurring theme in One Book, One Philadelphia. Orphan Train joins such books as Waiting for Snow in Havana by Carlos Eire (the 2007 selection); What Is the What? by Dave Eggars (2008); War Dances by Sherman Alexie (2011); and The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka (2012).

Kalela Williams, program coordinator of One Book, One Philadelphia, says the selection committee was moved by this theme: "Orphan Train frames identity through the lens of the people around you, the people you call family. Even at 91, Vivian is searching for family; the same for Molly. You have the family you're born into and the family you collect around you, the family you make."

Kalela adds that the novel is especially timely, with its themes of "immigrant children, and the sometime devastating impact of immigration on self and family. It also resonates with today's system of foster care and themes of home and residence."

Kline started with a lead - which turned out wrong - about a family member who might have been on an orphan train. Curiosity took over, and within a few years she was talking to original riders.

"I was incredibly lucky without knowing how lucky I was," Kline says. "When I began, there were maybe 150 train riders left, and now there are maybe 10, all 95 to 105 years old. I went to reunions, talked to survivors, and read first-person narratives. It is now no longer possible. But here were hundreds of stories waiting for the telling."

The mid- to late 1800s were years without social services. New York swarmed with thousands of indigent children. Without other recourse, society often put them in prisons, asylums, or poorhouses. Dismayed at the plight of children in the city, social crusader Charles Loring Brace created the Children's Aid Fund in 1853, which he headed for 37 years, touting his "Emigration Plan," the trains.

Meant as an act of mercy, the system ushered thousands of children into hardship, abuse, and servitude. "But in a way, the system also worked for many," Kline says. "The orphan train riders took solace in something about the Midwestern sensibility that's stoic, stolid, no-nonsense. They moved forward, had children, went to church." Many stayed in the states, and large numbers in the very towns where they first landed.

"However hard I try, I will always feel alien and strange," says Vivian in Orphan Train. All of us, child and adult, feel that way sometimes, Kline says: "That may be why so many communities and schools have adopted Orphan Train. It lets us have conversations about these issues - to tell our stories and hear those of others."

215-854-4406 @jtimpane