BOOK REVIEW: The Bereaved by Julia Park Tracey

I received this book for free from Netgalley. That did not influence this review.

The Bereaved by Julia Park Tracey, based on the author’s own family history, tells the story of “the orphan train” from the viewpoint not of orphaned children, but of a grieving mother.

Martha Lozier (once orphaned herself and farmed out to relatives) had found happiness as the wife of a prosperous farmer. Unfortunately, he dies suddenly, leaving her a widow with four children, one still a baby. The farm goes to Martha’s brother-in-law, and she is left without resources. Her children are put under the guardianship of a local lawyer, known by Martha (from personal circumstance) to be a dirty old man. His first act is to assault Martha’s teenage daughter. Knowing she has to keep her children safe, Martha steals them away to the city.

Martha is a skilled seamstress, but, taking refuge in a tenement, she can find only piecework. (Prostitution is the only other option.) Living hand-to-mouth, working from dawn to dusk at jobs that are not steadily available, unable to have her children educated, watching the older two reduced to menial work as well, all while slowly starving, makes Martha desperate. When two of her boys stumble across a “Home for the Friendless,” a religious set-up for orphans that was a front for child theft, where they find warmth and abundant food, she goes to see it for herself. Because it promises education, cleanliness, warmth, and nutrition, Martha agrees to put her two boys into the home. She signs papers “surrendering” them, little realizing the surrender is permanent. A few months later, in still more desperate straits, she surrenders her daughter and baby.

It isn’t until she begins to find her footing, and tries to retrieve her children, that she discovers they have been sent away on the orphan trains to be adopted or indentured. Now Martha begins to struggle to get them back.

This is a moving story of a woman fighting against almost insurmountable odds. While she is a sympathetic character, it’s hard to find anyone else in the novel (at least the first 80% or so of it) who isn’t either cold and unfeeling or downright evil. It probably wasn’t the best choice for a holiday-week read because, although ultimately redemptive, much of the book is a misery-fest.

Well-written, grounded in the historical context, and steadily paced, this is a convincing and unsettling look at how society treated women without power, and how families were torn apart when mothers and children fell through the cracks. It’s pretty scary to think we are going down the same broken path.