Orphan Train, a best-selling novel by Christina Baker Kline, features an unlikely friendship between a girl in foster care and 90+ year old Vivian. A community service position helping the widow clean out her attic is meant to keep Molly out of juvie for the theft of a library book, but it turns out to help Vivian answer questions about her past as an abandoned Irish immigrant child that have haunted her all her life.
Orphan Train is like a combination of my novels, The Medal and Finding Home (the one I’m editing now). In The Medal, an accidental meeting between a 92 year old WW II veteran and a troubled foster kid results in a friendship important to both. In Finding Home a young girl whose family dies of cholera in 1869 London, England, travels across the Atlantic with the first Home Children to find her family to Canada. On arrival, a twist of fate means she must make her own way in the world.
Such amazing parallels!