Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A Picture Worth an Entire Book

A Piece of the World by Christina Baker Kline

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  “Over the years, certain stories in the history of a family take hold. They’re passed from generation to generation, gaining substance and meaning along the way. You have to learn to sift through them, separating fact from conjecture, the likely from the implausible. Here is what I know: Sometimes the least believable stories are the true ones.” With these words Christina Olson introduces herself in A Piece of the World. It is a historical fiction, which plausibly imagines the story of Christina Olson, the […]

“We are headed toward the unknown, and we have no choice but to sit quietly in our hard seats and let ourselves be taken there.”

Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline

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This was a book club read, and not one I probably would have picked up on my own. Told in two timelines, we have two main POV characters: Molly Ayer, a 17 year old foster kid who is months away from aging out of the system. Molly is tough, and guarded, and like many foster kids, has been bounced around from placement to placement. Caught trying to steal a library book, Molly has to complete community service hours with nonagenarian Vivian, in order to avoid […]

“And eventually-though neither of us knew it yet-we’d end up here, in this place, within and without the world of the painting.”

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I’d never heard of the painting Christina’s World but it is an otherwise well known work by American artist Andrew Wyeth; Christina Baker Kline uses the painting as a launching point for her novel A Piece of the World which does an excellent job blending the lives of real people into an enjoyable piece of fiction. “Later he told me that he’d been afraid to show me the painting. He thought I wouldn’t like the way he portrayed me: dragging myself across the field, fingers clutching dirt, my […]

“I learned long ago that loss is not only probably but inevitable.”

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Orphan Train tells two stories set in two time lines. In 1929, we have nine year old Irish immigrant Niamh whose parents and siblings die in a horrific accident; in present day, we have seventeen year old foster child, Molly, who has struggled to fit in with her recent set of foster parents. Niamh is put on a train by the Children’s Aid Society and sent across the United States to find a family to adopt her. Unfortunately, the adoptions are handled more like cattle […]

“I learned long ago that loss is not only probable but inevitable”

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I had put off reading this one for a while, because I expected it to be depressing. It was sad, but not depressing — enough hopeful and wonderful things happen to balance out the parts that make you want to cry. “Do you believe in spirits? Or ghosts?…Yes, I do. I believe in ghosts….They’re the ones who haunt us. The ones who have left us behind.” Vivian Daly, a widow in her 90s, spend some time on an “orphan train” when she was a little girl. […]

Trains or Foster Homes?

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The Orphan Train Movement was a supervised welfare program that transported orphaned and homeless children from crowded Eastern cities of the United States to foster homes located largely in rural areas of the Midwest. The orphan trains operated between 1853 and 1929, relocating about 250,000 orphaned, abandoned, or homeless children.  Two charitable institutions, the Children’s Aid Society and later, the Catholic New York Foundling Hospital, endeavored to help these children. The two institutions developed a program that placed homeless, orphaned, and abandoned city children, who […]



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