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Reviews of We Rode the Orphan Trains |
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Booklist, Starred Review: |
In Orphan Train Rider: One Boy's True Story, Warren told the riveting drama of a destitute child sent from an eastern city to find a family in the Midwest. For this collective biography, she interviewed eight people who lived that story, all of whom are now in their eighties and nineties. It's a selective sample. These are people who really want to look back and talk about their lives and their stories are overwhelmingly positive: |
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| Moving accounts of love and acceptance, courage and resilience, success, and even reunion. Many do also remember the anguish before the happy ending; the nightmare of siblings torn apart, orphans treated as hired help, teased at school, abused at home.Younger readers won't be particularly interested in the adult experiences or in the photos of the adults with their families now, but the childhood memories are unforgettable. Warren frames the personal stories with commentary and information about social conditions at the time. She also raises essential questions: Would the children have done better if they had been left in orphanages? And what about today's foster children? This is powerful nonfiction for classroom and personal reading and for discussion. Warren includes websites of primary sources for children who want to learn more. | |
| Kirkus Review: | |
From 1854 to 1930, more than 200,000 orphaned or abandoned boys and girls were cleaned up, dressed in new clothes, and turned over to the custody of the agents of the Children's Aid Society. These groups of children traveled on "orphan trains" and arrived in towns of the Midwest and South with the expectation that they would be placed in loving homes. In this companion volume to the award winning Orphan Train Rider: One Boy's True Story (1996), Warren smoothly recounts seven more stories gathered from interviews and archival research. After a short introduction, she describes the hardship of the neglected and abused children and then the simple plan of finding homes in the West for "homeless children." Warren begins with the account of Clara Comstock, a former schoolteacher who as an agent made more than 72 trips on the orphan trains. The subjects, now in their late 70s to 90s, look back to their common experiences. Often no one told them why they were going on a train or what was happening; some had happy endings; still others fared not so well. Each chapter has a similar format: one train rider's story-earliest memories, the departure and train ride, being trouped out in front of strangers, being chosen, what happened their first day of placement, what happened to their siblings, visits from the agents, and the search for their origins. Generously illustrated with black-and-white photographs of people and places as well as reproductions of original source material. As fascinating as the original and a worthy sequel. |
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