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Christina Baker Kline
Christina Baker Kline is the author of the new novel A Piece of the World (Feb. 2017), about the relationship between the artist Andrew Wyeth and the subject of his best-known painting, Christina’s World. Kline has written five other novels -- Orphan Train, The Way Life Should Be, Sweet Water,... show more



Christina Baker Kline is the author of the new novel A Piece of the World (Feb. 2017), about the relationship between the artist Andrew Wyeth and the subject of his best-known painting, Christina’s World. Kline has written five other novels -- Orphan Train, The Way Life Should Be, Sweet Water, Bird in Hand, and Desire Lines-- and written or edited five works of nonfiction. Her 2013 novel Orphan Train spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list, including five weeks at # 1, and was published in 40 countries. More than 100 communities and colleges have chosen it as a “One Book, One Read” selection. Her adaptation of Orphan Train for young readers is Orphan Train Girl (May 2017). In addition to her novels, Kline has commissioned and edited two widely praised collections of original essays on the first year of parenthood and raising young children, Child of Mine and Room to Grow, and edited a book on grieving, Always Too Soon. She is coeditor, with Anne Burt, of a collection of personal essays called About Face: Women Write About What They See When They Look in the Mirror, and is co-author, with her mother, Christina Looper Baker, of a book on feminist mothers and daughters, The Conversation Begins. Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Money, More, and Psychology Today, among other places. Kline was born in Cambridge, England, and raised there as well as in the American South and Maine. She is a graduate of Yale, Cambridge, and the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow in Fiction Writing. She has taught fiction and nonfiction writing, poetry, English literature, literary theory, and women’s studies at Yale, NYU, and Drew University, and served as Writer-in-Residence at Fordham University for four years. She is a recipient of several Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Fellowships and Writer-in-Residence Fellowships at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is on the advisory board of Roots & Wings, a foster-care organization in NJ; The Criterion Theatre in Bar Harbor, ME; and the Montclair Animal Shelter, and supports a number of libraries and other associations.Kline lives in an old house in Montclair, New Jersey, with her husband, David Kline, and three sons, Hayden, Will, and Eli.  She spends as much time as possible in an even older house in Southwest Harbor, Maine.

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Community Reviews
Lazy days
Lazy days rated it 5 years ago
Damn life in the early 1900s was hard and the things that were allowed back then I can't even! Trains transporting hundreds of thousands of vulnerable orphaned children to be sold off like cattle. Appalling and fascinating and I devoured this book in a couple of days thereby breaking a bit of a slum...
My Never Ending List
My Never Ending List rated it 7 years ago
I waited till I finished reading this novel to view the portrait, Christina’s World, which surrounded this novel. I had my own version of what this painting entailed as I read the novel but as I viewed the actual image, the landscape felt more void and lonely than I had anticipated. Christina’s imag...
Thewanderingjew
Thewanderingjew rated it 8 years ago
The book essentially tells the story of events leading up to the painting of “Christina’s World” by Andrew Wyeth. I have always loved the painting and have a print of it in my home. It conjures up thoughts of hope as well as desperation, of longing and success, of family and serenity, of disappointm...
100 Pages A Day...Stephanie's Book Reviews
Molly Ayer is seventeen and has been kicked around the foster system in Maine for a good part of her life. With her current family, she doesn't quite fit in; her foster mom isn't too sure of Molly and is convinced that she is a bad kid. When Molly is caught stealing a copy of Jane Eyre from the li...
Sushicat
Sushicat rated it 9 years ago
I found the recounting of the circumstances under which the children grew up difficult to stomach. This history is not specific to the US, but can be found in other places as well. it reflects a view on children's worth and rights that is very different than what it is today (for the most part). I l...
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