Vivian is 91 years old. When she was 9 years old, she’d been left in the hands of the Children’s Aid Society after her family died in a fire in a New York City tenement building. The plight of abandoned orphans at the turn of the 20th century comes into focus through Vivian who rode an orphan train. According to the book cover, between 1854 and 1929, thousands of children “whose fates would be determined by pure luck” were relocated from eastern cities to the Midwest. As Vivian’s story describes, chaperones boarded the homeless children on trains and traveled with them to the Midwest where communities posted signs to alert citizens of the train’s arrival. One by one in city after city, the children were passed off. Older ones like Vivian typically
