Marianne Neumann has one goal in life: to find her lost younger sister, Sophie. When Marianne takes a job as a placing agent with the Children’s Aid Society in 1858 New York, she not only hopes to give children a better life but seeks to discover whether Sophie ended up leaving the city on an orphan train.Andrew Brady, her fellow agent on her first placing trip, is a former schoolteacher who has … schoolteacher who has an easy way with the children–firm but tender and funny. Underneath his handsome charm, though, seems to linger a grief that won’t go away–and a secret from his past that he keeps hidden. As the two team up placing orphans amid small railroad towns in Illinois, they find themselves growing ever closer . . . until a shocking tragedy threatens to upend all their work and change one of their lives forever.
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The Orphan Train series are wonderful. The characters jump off the pages and come to life. Could not put the book away,had to see what came next. Their struugle is so realistic and hard. Their faith is so stronge. A real wake up call as to how Faith conquers all.
Book Review: Will they have the courage to delve into their past in order to have a future with each other?
Jody Hedlund’s second installment of the Orphan Train series continues in it’s resplendence. After Elise Neumann and Thornton Quincy’s story in With You Always, we pick up with the next eldest Neumann sister, Marianne in 1858, New York.
Feeling extreme guilt that she let Elise down by essentially losing their younger sister, Sophie and the two children they took in, Marianne gets a job conducting children on the Orphan Train. With her job as a placing agent with the Children’s Aid Society, she hopes to get at least one clue to Sophies’s whereabouts to help ease her troubled heart. She certainly wasn’t expecting to find love, self discovery or self-forgiveness on the journey west.
Andrew Brady, or Drew as he now goes by, tries to live in the moment worry free. The past only haunts him if he even takes one moment to dwell upon it. He had given up the idea of settling down, of finding love again. Until he met a remarkable young women, Marianne Neumann, a co-agent that turned his carefree world upside down.
Guilt is a tragic human condition that can course-correct any life journey, but it can also stall any progress if stuck in a quagmire. Both Drew and Marianne are metaphorically in quicksand. As an enigma, it is only by marching headstrong into their past that they can move forward into their future. They need release their guilt and in the process they need to let go of each other in order to self-forgive. Sometimes the thing you love the most can set you free but only after you’ve let it go.
In this inspirational story, Jody Hedlund crafts excellent characters. She sets the stage with dramatic facts of a tragic time in American history. Yet most of all she tells about the hearts of good people doing their Christian duty to take care of others. Was the placement program perfect? No, but it did save a lot of children from dying of starvation and living homeless on the New York streets.
Jody Hedlund is excellent at taking a snapshot of time and recreating not only the historical accuracy, but the emotion of the time period. Readers are fully immersed in the plights of the characters as well as the history. Reading a Jody Hedlund novel really is taking a step back into a previous world, a previous time.
The Orphan Train series consists of a novella, An Awakened Heart; The first novel, With You Always; the second novel, Together Forever; and the Neumann sisters conclusion book three coming out in December 2018, Searching for You.
Be sure to visit Jody’s webpage to learn about her other wonderful novels.
FTC Disclaimer: I was given an ARC of this title by Bethany House Publishing for review purposes only; no compensation was awarded me.
I just finished reading Orphan Train – Together Forever by Jodi Hedlund. What a great read! I just love her books.
I found Together Forever to be a smooth read. Words flow easily through my mind, igniting my senses: sights, smells, almost feeling the air around the characters. Moments in time were experienced as if experiencing first hand, making history come to life. I identified with their weaknesses and strengths, their accomplishments and shortcomings, their fears and their faith, their sorrow and their joy.
ogether Forever is the second book in Jody Hedlunds Orphan Train series. Though this book can stand alone, I do recommend reading the first. It will help you better understand the characters in this read.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It isn’t often, if ever, that I’ve read a book about this historical time period strictly from the point of view of those responsible for placing the orphans. It certainly gives one empathy for the task they chose to perform. It took much sacrificial love and giving of oneself to do it well.
Hedlund once again brings history to life with absolutely wonderful characters, emotionally scenes, vivid detail, and a unique point of view from an interesting historical time of the orphan trains. This book will have a place on my forever shelves.
I received this book from the publisher. My opinions are all my own.
“Always remember, our responsibility is to God for these children. We bear in mind One died for them as for the children of the rich and happy.”
Once again Jody Hedlund entangles our hearts in the plight of orphans in 1858 and portrays both the difficulty of the children, and of the agents involved in what’s called “placing out”. It was equally hard to invest in trying to make the children’s lives better by giving them to good families as it is to make sure the families they do go to are going to treat them well and raise them right. Without modern day records, they had a rather crude way to record each placing out, but all too often the need outweighed the data recorded. Thousands of orphan children found new homes along the railroad route, from the youngest to the oldest. And in spite of the best intentions on the agents side, many of those weren’t good; children going to families just to provide extra working hands and treated little more than slaves. It’s heart-wrenching to think of this even though it really happened in our history.
In this story, we meet Drew who has a heart of gold & soft spot for each child under his care and Marianne who we met in the previous book. She came to be an agent under the guise of wanting to find her younger sister Sophia, who disappeared along the orphan train somewhere. Even though her sister is sixteen, Marianne feels a deep responsibility for losing her when she didn’t watch her closely enough. Drew has similar feelings after a tragedy happened to one of his students under him. Both are struggling with guilt and forgiving themselves for situations that they aren’t truly responsible for. It takes the realization that they can’t change the past and to move on in their faith in God for their hearts to heal. They also wrestle with an attraction that’s forbidden between agents. Drew has an impulsive nature while Marianne is more cautious and wanting to be above board in everything.
As with the first book, I thoroughly enjoyed this. I loved the faith message that Jody incorporated throughout and how both Drew & Marianne struggled with real life things that we all do; both in our thinking and actions. I enjoyed getting to know the children right along with them and how hard it would be to keep our emotions bottled up towards them. Lastly, I enjoyed learning more about how the orphan trains operated and what it took to organize a placing out trip. This is an emotion packed history lesson in fiction that will tug at your heart and leave you with a satisfied ending. You’ll definitely be left wanting more!
* I received a complimentary copy provided by Bethany House via Netgalley. I was under no obligation to write a favorable review and all opinions are my own. *
‘God wasn’t about to listen to her prayers, much less answer them.”
Marianne Neumann’s one priority in life is to find her younger sister Sophie. She hires on with the Children’s Aid Society so that to have an insider job and maybe find her sister. The year is 1858 and children are being taken by orphan train across the country to find parents and escape the brutal life on the streets they have been living. But Sophie has seemingly disappeared and Marianne has to find her.
She meets a fellow agent, Andrew Brady, a former schoolteacher who has a way with children and they travel the train together making sure the children are settled. Drew is a handsome and charming man, but he carries a deep burden within his heart. He and Marianne are drawn to one another, but a shocking tragedy threatens to forever separate them and destroy their work.
Jody Hedlund became a favorite with her very first book. She does great research into the subject of her books and writes in such a way that the reader is drawn right into the book. This one warms the heart and breaks it at the same time. I can’t imagine a child having to be chosen after traveling cross country on an orphan train. But yet this happened in our nation. Hedlund tells the story and tells it well.
*My thanks to the publisher for a copy of this book. The opinions stated are entirely my own.