In this article, Wade Bell from the University of Gothenburg reviews Making Home: Making Home: Orphanhood, kinship, and cultural memory in contemporary American novels.

He begins by talking of the orphan stories that informed his growing up in the US when Ronald Reagan was president and states that “Although the orphan figure is not unique to North America, it really seems to hold a special place there…”

Bell is enthusiastic about Making Home and concludes that the book “seems to find one commonality that might even help explain the orphan figure’s prominence in American narratives”.

That being, that “Figuratively speaking, America is a land of orphans, all looking to make a new kind of home in a land marked by difference, conflict, and change.