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

c.2025, Bold Type Books, $32, 352 pages

The childhood you had was not the one you were meant for.

Chores and work weren’t for you, not when you could’ve been adopted by a rich bald man who lived in a mansion, who sang and danced with you and took you on adventures. That was the life you should’ve had but alas, you were just a normal kid. That’s probably for the better although – as in the new book, “The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow” by Kristen Martin – you still weren’t meant for any hard luck life.

Quick: think of an orphan. 

Did you imagine of a curly-headed moppet in a red dress, a scruffy dog.by her side?  That, says Martin, is an old trope, mostly overused in literature, pop culture, TV, and movies. The truth is that what most people think of when they think of orphans – kids who have no living parents – are generally rare these days.

Even the orphanages that come to mind aren’t true to history. Yes, for nearly 200 years, orphanages sheltered parentless children with otherwise no family, but many institutions went a step further: white parents who couldn’t care for their kids could temporarily place them in orphanages, reclaiming them when things got better.

As for Black children, they were on their own.

While religious organizations always seemed willing to take in children to educate, starting in the 1860s, a New York City organization shipped random children – not necessarily orphaned ones – via trains across America to be adopted by loosely vetted strangers. Similarly, a Catholic nun created a “foundling” shelter for unwanted babies, some who were likewise dispatched on trains. Infant travelers were generally adopted and raised by loving families but many older kids who were sent cross-country worked hard and went unloved, which led the New York American Society for the Cruelty to Animals to take up the plight of abused, homeless, poor, or abandoned children.

This, Martin says, wasn’t the worst of it. The worst, she says, came from our federal government.

Do you have tunes from a certain movie or Broadway show stuck in your head right now, or thoughts of a popular novel you’ve read? Yeah, that’s mostly fantasy, Martin says, and in the book, she uses personal stories and real history to set the story straight.

Eye-opening, part autobiography, part social science, part history, this book reaches back nearly two centuries before bringing readers to modern times, making careful distinction between the types of orphans that exist and putting fictional treatments into perspective by highlighting reality, versus common beliefs. Toward the end of her book, Martin gives readers an honest gut-punch overview of the treatment of Black and Native children before examining today’s foster system and explaining how we can do better. By then, you’ll want to know.

Most readers love a good underdog story, and this one has that feel but without fictional drama. If you want an absorbing, sometimes shocking social history, “The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow” is the one meant for you.