Reaction to Orphan Train

For the past couple weeks, my class has been reading the novel Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline. The book is about a goth high school orphan girl named Molly who steals a copy of Jane Eyre from the library and is sentenced to do 50 hours of community service. Her boyfriend Jack offers her a job with his mom cleaning out an old woman named Vivian's attic. Molly is very reluctant to do this but goes for it anyway. She gets an unexpected surprise when she finds out that Vivian was an orphan train rider back in 1929. The two find surprising similarities in each other in ways they didn't expect to. 

Personally, I'm iffy with this book. I really enjoyed the parts of the novel where Vivian told her story, as they were adventurous and exciting. Molly's parts of the book made me angry because, in comparison to Vivian, she has things so easy yet complains about everything. Things for Molly could be normal if she'd just go with the flow as opposed to fighting everything her foster parent's say and getting in trouble all the time. I feel that Molly tries too hard to be different and interesting to the point where it's annoying.Overall I felt as though Vivian had more to offer in the story as opposed to Molly, but I guess Molly's character was necessary for fitting Vivian into the story. 

Overall, if it hadn't been required for me to read Orphan Train, I probably wouldn't have read it to begin with. I feel as though if I hadn't read it, I wouldn't be missing out on anything. The history of the orphan trains were very interesting to read and I enjoyed it, however I did not enjoy the story itself.