Desire Lines by Christina Baker Kline

When Kathryn Campbell celebrated her high school graduation around a bonfire with her group of closest friends in 1986, she never expected that her best friend Jennifer would walk into the woods that night and would never be seen again.  After a frantic summer search, Kathryn tries to move on with life, but Jennifer’s fate and the many questions that remain linger. This makes it hard for her to move on.  After her marriage fails, she moves back to her hometown of Bangor, Maine and in with her mother.  She is just in time for her 10-year high school reunion.  She gets an assignment from the local paper and her friend Jack to look into Jennifer’s disappearance 10-years later.  The secrets she discovers may well help her to find her final conclusion and peace.

I enjoyed this book immensely.  I loved the overall mystery and how it influenced Kathryn’s life.  She can’t move on until this mystery is solved.  I also loved the setting in the 1990’s.  I graduated from high school in 1996 so having the main action set in that year 10 years after the kidnapping was wonderful.  I will admit that I guessed what may have happened early on, but that the actual circumstances of the event kept me guessing until the end.  I also loved learning about orienteering in this novel.  Jennifer was really into orienteering and it sounds like a great sport.

Overall, if you are looking for a great suspense novel to curl up to in these fall days, I highly recommend Desire Lines.  I also must mention that I LOVE the cover.  I think the red leaf and trees are just beautiful and go well with the novel itself.

Book Source:  Review copy from William Morrow – Thank-you!

Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline

Orphan Train was a book that kept me riveted from the beginning to end. The story seamlessly connected two lives that on the surface couldn’t be more different. Vivian is a 91-year old widow living in a mansion in Maine. Molly is a 17-year old foster child that has placed in several different bad homes and has a current problem with the law. In order to not go to juvenile detention, Molly finds a volunteer project, cleaning out Vivian’s attic. As Molly starts to sort through Vivian’s items with the elder lady’s help, the two discover they have a lot in common. And Molly begins to realize that Vivian is going through her items more as a way to look at them all and remember one last time rather than to actually clean them out.

The novel switches between two perspectives, the future through Molly’s perspective, and the past through Vivian’s. I found Molly’s story as a Foster child growing up bouncing between families to be touching and interesting, but I was mostly riveted by Vivian’s story. Vivian was a young Irish immigrant to the United States with her family in the 1920’s. After a devastating fire, she is sent on an “orphan train” from New York City to Minnesota. What she finds upon reaching Minnesota is that often people adopted children from the orphan trains as more indentured servants than as children to love. Vivian finds herself in rather dire situations that were very true to life at the time.

I did not know anything about the orphan trains until I read The Chaperone last year and was also riveted by the orphan train subplot of that novel. It is sad that many of the children were stigmatized coming on the orphan train and not all were able to find a happy ending.

SPOILER ALERT!

The only thing I didn’t like about the novel was Vivian’s lost child at the end. I felt that was sprung on the reader last minute and didn’t seem true to the character of Vivian. After her troubled times in the system, I could not understand why Vivian would give her child up for adoption, even though she was a young widow. She had her adopted parents to help her out and was a very capable young woman. For other readers of the novel, what was your sense on this development of the novel?

SPOILER END

I loved the character development and plot of the novel. I thought the juxtaposition of the two stories and how things can be so similar between the past and present was brilliant. I highly recommend this novel.

Book Source: Review Copy from William Morrow. Thank-you!!