Christina Baker Kline

Christina's World is one of Andrew Wyeth's most well-known paintings. It is stark and evocative, and one can't help wondering about the woman and the landscape in which she appears. Christina Baker Kline combined historical sources and her own creativity to tell the story of Christina Olson and her life on a farm in rural Maine. Christina had a degenerative condition which limited her mobility and eventually led to a reclusive life, cared for by her brother in the house they grew up in. show more Wyeth spent his summers in Maine and used rooms in Christina’s house as his studio. He figures prominently in the story but is definitely a secondary character.

Kline brought both Christina and rural Maine to life. While the painting depicts a vast landscape, Christina’s world actually became quite small. She faced her disability with courage, resisting opportunities to meet with doctors and refusing to use a wheelchair throughout her life. She stared down those who judged her or demonstrated excessive pity. But behind her tough exterior was a woman with ambitions and desires which often conflicted with family loyalty. For Christina, loyalty was paramount -- she gave herself to caring for her parents and running the farm and expected the same from her brother. As the novel draws to a close, it’s clear Christina’s world is only getting smaller, and yet this bittersweet novel was still satisfying. show less

This "ready for Hallmark Channel" tale tells the story of two orphans, each wounded, who find and fix each other. Orphan #1 is Molly, teenage goth on the outside, misunderstood intellectual on the inside. Orphan #2 is Vivian (born Niamh Power of Galway, Ireland), a gracious 80ish year old widow who as a child was transported from the slums of New York to the Midwest on an orphan train, there to be raised/exploited by a succession of increasingly ghastly foster families.

I enjoyed that the show more story evoked a period of U.S. history with which I was unfamiliar. Apparently, a progression of self-satisfied social organizations busied themselves transporting city urchins to Midwest farms between 1854-1929 - an unconscionably long period for a social experiment that couldn't have been more efficiently designed to exploit helpless children. Much of the pathos of this tale derives from the reader's awareness that the horrors experienced by Vivian are probably fairly realistic representations of what happened to these children in real life - exploited as free labor, deprived of education, physically and sexually abused.

Ultimately, Kline opts to forego the Charles Dickens ending in favor of what you might call the Little Orphan Annie ending. Dilutes the social significance of the tale, but, hey, it's a whole lot less depressing. Having said that, I couldn't help but feel that once Kline had done with Vivian's travails, her own interest in the story somewhat waned. The final chapters of the book seem increasingly rushed, and culminate in a final sequence of events that feel uncomfortably manipulated - to include what may be the world's shortest and luckiest internet genealogical search.

I went into this without great expectations, having observed that the blurbs on the back cover were all penned by fellow authors rather than actual reviewers - usually a bad sign. But Kline's a competent writer, the characters are likeable (perhaps a little cardboardy, but likeable), and the story does educate its readers about an episode in U.S. history that shouldn't be allowed to be forgotten. show less

"People think the painting is a portrait, but it isn't. Not really. He wasn't even in the field, he conjured it from a room in the house, an entirely different angle. He removed rocks and trees and outbuildings The scale of the barn is wrong and I am not that frail young thing, but a middle-aged spinster. It's not my body, really, and maybe not even my head. He did get one thing right: Sometimes a sanctuary, sometimes a prison, that house on the hill has always been my home. I've spent my show more life yearning toward it wanting to escape it, paralyzed by its hold on me. show less

As a fan of history, I was surprised to discover there is an aspect of American History I’d never heard of: Orphan Trains. Between 1854 and 1929, thousands of orphaned and abandoned children were collected and shipped to the Midwest; many ending up in situations not much different than indentured servitude.

During this time, there was no social safety net or child labor laws. It was a social experiment that was intended to improve the lives of destitute children. It may have worked for show more some, but in the long run, were these children better off? They children had already suffered a great deal and now were shipped off to places and families as foreign to them as their pasts and culture were to their adoptive families. As a real life rider Pat Thiessen noted, “. . . I always felt they were not my people. And they weren’t.”

This sound eerily similar to the assimilation efforts made by the American government when they forced Native American children to attend boarding schools in order to be “Americanized”.

Connecting the this past to the present, the author brings together Molly, a Native American and a product of a difficult childhood and multiple foster homes and and Vivian, an orphan train rider.

Molly and Vivian are separated by age but not much else and discover this while working together to clear Vivian’s attic. Instead of removing old items, memories are re-lived and shared; commonalities found; self-identity and self-worth developed and eventually, accepted.

Chapters of the story vary between two times – the past of Vivian and the present of Molly. It was a challenge according to the author, but she (with the help of a wonderful editor) makes it work.

Even though there are two storylines, they work together to give a reader the sense that they are reading a single story. It is a story about relationships between people and cultures. How the perceptions and prejudices of others can undermine someone’s self-identity, but not destroy it.

Vivian and Molly are both faced with situations that at one point in their lives, they find it difficult to trust anyone. But ultimately, good people outweigh the bad and they learn it’s okay to trust.

At about three hundred pages, this will be a great read for anyone under any circumstance. The chapters are short enough that if you have to put it down to get off at the next stop, or the flight landed, or your lunch hour is over, it shouldn’t be a problem. Of course wanting to put it down is another matter. At no time did I ever feel like there was fluff or filler. Every paragraph and chapter worked and before I knew it, I was reading the last chapter.

I know there is a lot of talk going on about this book, and it is well-deserved. I’m so glad I was able to get a review copy, but I assure you, I would have gladly paid for a copy. In fact, it not only goes on my “recommendation” list but on my “books to give as a gift” list. show less