Based on her research into her grandfather’s past as an adopted child, Julia Park Tracey has created a mesmerizing work of historical fiction illuminating the darkest side of the Orphan Train.
In 1859, women have few rights, even to their own children. When her husband dies and her children become wards of a predator, Martha – bereaved and scared – flees their beloved country home taking the children with her to the squalor of New York City. But as a naïve woman alone, preyed on by male employers, she soon finds herself nearly destitute. The Home for the Friendless offers free food, clothing, and schooling to New York’s street kids and Martha secures a place temporarily for her children there. When she returns for them, she discovers that the Society has indentured her two eldest out to work via the Orphan Train, and has placed her two youngest for adoption. The Society refusing to help and with the Civil War erupting around her, Martha sets out to reclaim each of them.
Author Julia Park Tracey’s ancestors and their stories have given her a trail to follow from New York and New England to the deep south and the Pacific Coast. The Bereaved: A Novel, the story of her great great grandmother’s loss of her children to the Orphan Train was named in the top 100 indie books published in 2023 by Kirkus Reviews. Christian Kiefer, author of the newly released The Heart of it All, said: “In The Bereaved, Julia Park Tracey reopens America’s wounds in prose that is propulsive and resonant. Theodore Dreiser comes to mind, but so, too, the fine contemporary novels of Jo Baker and Maggie O’Farrell.”