Orphan train

Trust the tale, not the teller, D. H. Lawrence advised readers. But Kline doesn't trust her carefully researched and appalling story of 1920s orphans swept off the streets of New York and sent to the Midwest, where their foster families were subject to scant official supervision. To infuse her historical fiction with contemporary appeal, Kline has her protagonist, Niamh Power, an Irish immigrant who was just 9 when she lost her family in a tenement fire, look back on her life, at age 91, and tell her story to a 17-year-old Penobscot Indian, Molly Ayer, a ward of the state who suffers discrimination and mistreatment. Niamh's passage through three Minnesota families - the Byrnes, who exploit her; the Grotes, who abuse her; and the Nielsens, who are kind - is colloquial and engaging, but alternating chapters on Molly, the goth bad girl from Maine, are generic in characterization and crude in their parallels with Niamh.