"All aboard!" Grand Central Terminal, New York City, the late 1880s. An Irish boy and three German sisters are among those put on an "orphan train" headed West. Like thousands of impoverished immigrant children before them, they will be "placed out" along the way: given to strangers, farm couples who agree to foster them until age eighteen. Because siblings are routinely separated by placing them out at different train stops, the quartet's lives inevitably diverge. They unfold in dramatic and unexpected ways as the orphan train riders grow into adulthood in Texas at the dawn of the twentieth century. Will all of them make it to adulthood? Will any of them ever see each other again?

Full of action and surprises, Placed Out explores the meaning of courage, hope, friendship and "family." The gripping, sprawling saga is the fictionalized account of the four orphan train riders and the people with whom their lives intersect. It chronicles their experiences as they make their way into young adulthood. Their story opens in New York City in the 1880s, but it unfolds in Texas as the 19th century draws to a close and the 20th century dawns.

Between 1854 and 1929, Eastern cities placed an estimated quarter of a million homeless and destitute immigrant children on trains headed west. By the latter part of the 20th century, the trains had come to be known as the "orphan trains," and the children as "orphan train riders." The young riders were "placed out" to rural families in the hope they would have better lives. In the words of Charles Loring Brace, founder of the Children's Aid Society of New York and the placing out movement, the hope was that each child would have "a sweet childhood of air and sky." Indeed, some farm couples and their families joyfully welcomed a new family member. Other couples, however, viewed a child as little more than a temporary, unpaid laborer who owed them gratitude for providing meager sustenance and basic shelter.

During the movement's three-quarters of a century of existence, the trains distributed their precious cargo to 47 of the then 48 states. The movement came to a quiet close on May 31, 1929, with the placing of three boys in Sulfur Springs, Texas.