Along the way, Em becomes friends with Caleb Reynolds, an unusual man also struggling with loss. She is adopted by a man who leaves her to sleep in his barn, while Lucy goes to live with a family in a town far off years pass before Em gathers the resources to search for her. “I read through enough personal accounts of train riders to know that there were beautiful stories of orphans finding homes,” Fordham said, “and that there were tragic stories of children being placed in homes where they were neglected and abused.”Įm, a 19-year-old orphan at the start of the story, is separated from her younger sister, Lucy. When she learned about the orphan trains of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, she got on board to find out more.īetween 18, the so-called “mercy trains” relocated some 250,000 orphaned or abandoned children from the cities of the East and took them to foster families mostly in the Midwest, according to the National Orphan Train Complex website,. She grew up in Shelton, and has moved all over the country, living in Idaho and in Buffalo, N.Y. The audience, enchanted, would beg for more.Īt the same time Fordham has a fierce interest in history. She’d tell her kids bedtime stories: complex ones that continued night after night. Fordham was a storyteller long before she became a novelist.
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