Back when I was addicted to People Magazine, I’m sure it was royal weddings and celebs on diets or in rehab that made me buy an issue. But deep inside its pages, People’s reporters offered up quieter stories that really grabbed me by the collar.

Two points for you if you can guess which kind of story:

1. Animal rescue

2. Adoptions and/or orphans

3. Dreamers whose big idea finally paid off.

And the answer is: 2. I mean, the drama is built in. Where’s my mommy? Here’s why I couldn’t keep my baby. How will I eat or stay warm?

I’d lay awake thinking about them. I’d re-read them.

Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline is right up this alley.

It begins with teenaged Molly who, after years in the foster system, faces life “like a cat with its back up.” Things aren’t going well with her foster parents. Then she steals a library book, and faces either time in juvie or community service.

She chooses service.

And hies herself off to the home of elderly Vivian, who needs help cleaning out her attic.

One day she arrives at the house early. No one answers the door, so she lets herself in. The way the housekeeper reacts — “Terry narrows her eyes and frowns. ‘You can’t just show up when you feel like it.” — speaks volumes about kids with no home, no parents.

Vivian’s got a story of her own. When life threw too much at her Irish immigrant parents, Vivian found herself in an orphanage, then eventually on a train to the Midwest. Vivian and her fellow orphans, caught up in a scheme to match cast-off youngsters with short-handed prairie families, crossed their fingers that somebody would want them, that they wouldn’t have to get back on the train and ride to the next town, and the next, before they found a family.

Not that their problems were solved when some bedraggled farmer pointed their way and said, “I’ll take that one.”

Like I said, the drama is built in.

And yes, there really were orphan trains.

For a subject this rich with possibility, the story flapped like a chicken instead of soaring like an eagle. I have no doubt that Kline did her homework. It showed, a little too much. I could almost see her digging through boxes of old pictures, which got in the way of living the story through the orphan girl’s eyes.

Orphan Train is still an interesting read, just less gripping than it could have been.

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I don’t know what Vivian back when she was with her Irish parents. Likely it included cabbage.  I trolled through the grocery store this week, filling my cart with cabbage, onions, potatoes. Wow, really stocking up on the peasant food, I told myself.

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But the results, Kielbasa Cabbage Skillet, were so good that I ate not only the leftovers and the leftover-and-over-and-overs.

It’s probably because the sauce is full of sugar. My kind of sauce.

And on top of it all, three desserts:

White chocolate-covered pretzels, pumpkin flavored; Cocoa Fudge Cake; Last week's Crunchy Candy Clusters

White chocolate-covered pretzels, pumpkin flavored; Cocoa Fudge Cake; last week’s Crunchy Candy Clusters