REVIEW: The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood by Kristen Martin

Reviewed by Carolyn Roy-Bornstein

What many of us know about orphans has been shaped largely around fiction. From the comic strip Little Orphan Annie to the novel series The Boxcar Children; from Annie the musical to after school TV specials like Party of Five, the narrative arc of the American orphan is the same. Parents die an untimely death. Orphaned children are taken in by cruel adults who serve to magnify the children’s misfortune. Ultimately, the orphans overcome their pitiful circumstances, escape their fate, and thrive in a vast world of possibility.

Kristen Martin understands this narrative well, not just through her research, but because her own story differs markedly from these sunny fictions. Martin’s mother died of lung cancer when she was 12, followed two years later by her father’s fallout from his prostate cancer. At 14, Martin and her brother were orphans. Unlike the children whose circumstances she researches and presents in this book, she and her brother were cared for by family, finished high school, and went to college. Though they could not be protected from the sharp blade of grief, they were spared the vagaries of the foster care system.

In her book The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood (Bold Type Books, January 2025) Martin describes powerfully and in clear-eyed detail the bleak orphanages of the early 1800’s run by religious organizations interested more in indoctrinating young souls than providing families with needed services. She meticulously documents the true history of the so-called “orphan trains” at the turn of the 20th century, purportedly placing orphans with wholesome rural families in the Midwest but often offering them up as indentured labor and keeping poor to no records, making reunification next to impossible.

The children Martin writes about are often not technically orphans with two dead parents but rather children who live in extreme poverty whose living parent often suffers from mental illness or substance abuse. Throughout this country’s history, these children have consistently been removed from their families rather than having their parents offered treatment and support. (Full disclosure: I am the foster mom to two of the kinds of kids Martin describes.)

This is a major point of her book: that systems that separate families in the name of protecting children get it wrong. Families struggling with poverty and addiction need access to resources, not to have their children forcibly removed from them. The problems inherent in families’ struggles are societal, not individual, requiring a societal approach, not a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” one.

No one is affected more by this flawed approach than Black and Native American families. And Martin calls out this racism and classism that has defined our country’s attitude to caring for dependent children for centuries. Black children today are overrepresented in foster care, with 10% of Black children going through the foster care system when only 6% of all American children will ever experience it. And while only 12% of American children will ever be the subject of a child maltreatment investigation, one in five Black children will. One need look no further than the Civilization Fund Act which Congress passed in 1819 to fund boarding schools which removed Native children from their families and tribes to “civilize” them or the Indian Adoption Project of 1958 which forcibly placed Native children in white adoptive and foster homes, to understand the disproportionality of treatment of America’s dependent children.

Martin effectively and uniquely structures her book around narratives, framing the true version of our country’s treatment of dependent children against the sanitized fictional accounts we tell ourselves. I am a big believer in the power of story to open hearts and minds, to motivate social change, and to put a human face on uncomfortable truths. I used my story as the mother of a child with a traumatic brain injury to urge teenagers and college students not to drink and drive. As the narrative medicine facilitator at a large family medicine residency program, I use stories in literature to help doctors process their patient care experiences. I am also part of an international project that presents first person narratives at UN climate change conferences to create urgency around the topic and inspire climate action.

Martin successfully uses story in this way. She understands that stories can be shorthand for talking about painful subjects we would prefer remain undiscussed. We as a country have not been good at looking at the darker parts of our collective history. We gloss over slavery, deny our segregationist past. Martin wants us to avoid this same mistake with our treatment of dependent children. With The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow, she is helping us to look at that history, to own it, and in so doing, she is hoping we will begin to improve our approach to these young lives.