When Oscar Allen, eight year-old Manhattan foundling, ward of the state and child of the streets, and Lillian Hanover, a newly-married Nebraska farm girl still mourning her own parents, are brought together by circumstance in the fall of 1922, they form a bond that neither could have imagined and neither will ever regret...

NATIVE CHILD is the extraordinary story of an unlikely family: one of the very last of 200,000 "orphan train" riders, sent west from New York by the Children's Aid Society at his own request, and the young couple from the small town of Spring Valley, Nebraska who impulsively take him in.

Oscar's reasons for fleeing his native city are just as obscure as Lem's and Lillian's for opening their home to him-no cause for concern at first, but as the three grow in mutual understanding, what remains unsaid endangers their new intimacy. Ultimately, only further accidents of fate and the deep, irrevocable commitment a young boy and young woman insist on making to each other can break the silence and persuade Oscar to reclaim his lost voice.