Finished: Orphan Train (Kline) Book Club Book #8. A moving story about loss, despair, determination, and finally hope as we follow two different orphan girls from two different eras who end up meeting and sharing their like experiences when the first is 91 and the second 17. Nine year old Niamh, pronounced Neev, is a little Irish immigrant girl living in depression-era New York, fresh off the boat from Ireland with her mother, father, six-year old twin brothers and baby sister when a fire takes the life of her entire family except her (or so she believes at the time). Niamh is put on one of the infamous orphan trains in New York, run by the Children's Aid Society, and transported out to Minnesota, where she survives two different foster homes, each deplorable in its own way, but the second far more dangerous than the first. When the father of the second home tries to molest her, Niamh is taken in by the kind, young, and single school teacher, Miss Larsen. Miss Larsen takes Niamh home to meet her landlady, Mrs. Murphy, who runs the single women's home for young working women. Though Mrs. Murphy would love to raise Niamh as her own, she cannot afford to do so either, but she introduces Niamh to a lovely couple who run the town store, the Nielsen's. Having lost their own daughter at a young age, the Nielsen's take to Niamh and she to them. She becomes an astute business woman at a young age and helps make the store a huge success, even through the war years. Having accepted the new name of Vivian, she is thrilled one day at the age of nineteen to run into her old orphan train mate, Dutchy, as he was known to her then...now known as Luke. Spending an entire night catching up and amazed that they ever found each other again after ten years (even though Dutchy had promised Niamh he would one day find her), they fall in love and get married....only to have Dutchy be shipped off to World War II and get killed in action. :-( Pregnant with his child, Vivian is devastated and swears that she can't take another single loss in her life. She names her baby girl after she's born, then gives her up for adoption...then throws herself into running and expanding the store. She remarries Dutchy's best friend and shipmate a year later with the declared intention that she will never have children. She never loves Jim like she loved Dutchy, but her marriage lasts the rest of her life until she finally outlives Jim. Rich beyond her dreams, with the money from the successful store, Vivian is 91 and living alone in a huge mansion in Maine when her maid's son's girlfriend, 17 year old Molly Ayer, is assigned community service hours for stealing a book from the local library. In and out of her own foster care nightmares since her father died when she was 8 and her mother incarcerated a year later for drug use, Molly is now living with a couple who are basically just housing her for the foster care money. There's not really any empathy or love there, which Molly soon finds instead from Vivian! Her community service involves 50 hours of helping Vivian clean out her attic. Of course, everything in the attic relates back to Vivian's past so Molly is treated to the stories of Vivian's past as an orphan train girl. A few twists and turns evolve along the way....like finding out that Vivian's baby sister didn't really die in the fire, but was adopted by the Jewish couple in the next flat...the same couple who told little Niamh that her entire family was dead, even her baby sister, before sending Niamh to the Children's Aid Society. Anyway, by the end of the story, you can tell that Molly has truly found someone in Vivian who cares for her, and vice versa. Molly helps Vivian find the daughter that she gave up for adoption all those years before. It turns out the daughter put in a request fourteen years earlier in hopes of finding her birth mother. The story ends with that daughter arriving to meet her mother with her own 11 year old granddaughter in tow...a little redhead, just like Niamh was all those years ago. A very good story that I'm so glad I read! At first I wasn't sure this book would appeal to me, but it definitely tugged at my heartstrings. So sorry to see Dutchy die though. :-(