Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline

Warning, spoilers.

Niamh is an Irish immigrant whose family all perishes in NYC, so she’s sent west on an Orphan Train. She has various miserable placements but comes out all right. The story of her youth is juxtaposed with a modern-day story where the 91-year-old Niamh, now Vivian, connects with a troubled teenager.

This is a lightweight story where the characters are either Good or Evil, and you see everything coming from a mile away. Except one thing – although you knew that Niamh would reunite eventually with Dutchy, a boy she met on the train going west, I did NOT expect her to literally go to bed with him within hours of their reunion. I mean, I thought they’d go for a drink or something.

The story of Niamh’s loss after loss culminates with the biggest loss of all: she has a baby and gives it up for adoption. This lets the book end with a mother-child-grandchild reunion where everyone is wonderful and looks like each other. Swelling violins, please.

I read this because it was a gift from my step-mother-in-law. I kept reading it because I did want to follow the Niamh story. As always tends to happen with books that interweave two very different stories, however, there’s always one I like better; and hence the other one keeps cropping up as a mere annoyance. Old Lady Vivian of course is attached to all her old keepsakes and of course she and troubled Molly eventually achieve a deep bond. I didn’t care, I wanted to see how the orphan turned out. ( )

PS  I think it’s time for some more Jane Austen.

Fibershed by Rebecca Burgess with Courtney White

Nice photographs, and an immensely interesting topic – doing the “locavore” thing for textiles. But the text! I admit I skimmed a lot. I just could not focus. I was consistently amazed at how the authors could make such a fascinating topic such a dull slog of a read. Growing flax for linen, naturally colored cotton, natural dyestuffs, alpaca cooperatives – every time I turned to a new chapter about something I thought “now THIS is finally going to get interesting,” nope. Another page of text I could not get through.

Too bad, because it is a fun topic. As someone who raises fiber animals and makes yarn and loves weaving, I could be and should be the first to be all gung-ho about local textile production. But there seem to be lots of reasons it’s different from food, in terms of the future of truly localized sourcing and production. Reasons they didn’t really get into in this book. Or maybe they did. Honestly, I can’t be sure. ( )

Vanishing Fleece by Clara Parkes

Clara Parkes buys a 676-pound bale of raw wool and sees it through to the finished yarn stage, by means of several differing mills and dye shops. Kind of the Michael Pollan of yarn. Basically, this book should have been titled, “Hey, Chris, Over Here”.

Clara buys her wool on shearing day from a farm in New York state. She sends some of it to Bartlett Yarn in Maine, some to Blackberry Ridge in Wisconsin, some to a big mill called S&D, some to a precious-sounding two-person natural dye studio in California, some to a big chemical dye company in Biddeford, Maine. It’s FUN!

The mills and shops are all wildly different, and give her wildly different results, almost all of them wonderful. Bartlett gives her a pleasing yarn she describes as being like “oatmeal,” in contrast to the lovely yarn Blackberry gives her, which she compares to “jasmine rice.” I thought those were knockout descriptions.

Clara’s excitement is palpable. On the floor of one vast spinning mill, she says she feels like she’s been shrunk to miniature size and let loose inside her Mom’s Singer sewing machine. Another great description!

I liked that Clara is based in Maine and visits places I’m familiar with, like the dyeing company in Biddeford – haven’t visited them per se, but I do think I was in a brewery next door last summer.

I may try more of her books – she seems like a super-fun fellow-wool-traveler! ( )