Overview

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 nave 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.

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9781736795422

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In The Bereaved, Julia Park Tracey reopens America's wounds in prose that is propulsive and resonant. Martha's struggles are the stuff of classic literature. Theodore Dreiser comes to mind but so too the fine contemporary novels of Jo Baker and Maggie O'Farrell.--Christian Kiefer, Author of Phantoms

Author Information

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. Park Tracey has three counties in California who claim her for their own: Sonoma County where she was raised; Alameda County where she was a columnist, journalist, and Poet Laureate; and Nevada County where she currently resides. She is the author or editor of six books, including two collected diaries of her aunt, a teen flapper in the Roaring Twenties. She has written for Redbook, HuffPost, The Sun, Salon, and Babble. She is also a partner and the Executive Editor at Sibylline Books.

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