Orphanland - Lauren Fischer - ★★.¾

AUTHOR: Lauren Fischer

GENRE: Teen Fiction

PUBLICATION DATE: November 12, 2025

RATING: 2.75 stars.

In a Nutshell: A contemporary upper-middle-grade mystery about a group of orphans and a bunch of secrets. Nice characters but not all sound their age. A good small-town setting but it could have been used better. Interesting themes but too many of them clutter the plot. Inclusive but preachy. Basically, a mixed experience for me, but I admire the heart behind this debut attempt.

Plot Preview:

2019. Ohio, USA. Eleven-year-old Willa has been a resident of the Southern Ohio Children’s Home for four years, ever since her mom died from a drug overdose. Opioid abuse is a common problem in the community, and the Home is a haven for several “drug orphans” as well as other children in need. Willa hopes to always be at the Home, even though she gets in trouble at times. She loves the place, her teacher, her companions, and most of all, Mercy (the director of the Home). The newest resident of the Home is Kacey, a nonbinary teen who has been rejected by their parents for their gender identity. Willa and Kacey soon become fast friends. When the duo discover a secret diary written by Mercy’s late aunt, they stumble upon a dark history connected to the past of the Home and the town.

The story comes to us in Willa’s first-person perspective.

This is a book that has its heart in the right place. Sadly, mere heart cannot ensure a memorable reading experience. The execution needed some finetuning. Most of my feedback is balanced across the positives and negatives.

Willa is an interesting lead in that she is aware of what she wants and also of her strengths and weaknesses. I loved her awareness of herself. However, she hardly ever seems her age in the book. Granted, children in tougher circumstances are often forced to grow up before their time, but there would still be some occasions when we can see the child in them. Not Willa, though. She always sounds like a much older teen. She also often acts on the assumption of “I know more than the adults in my life” and disregards several potential dangers and important instructions – never an inclusion I enjoy in children’s fiction.

Surprisingly, Willa’s narration feels very distanced. Given that the book is in first-person, I expected her emotions to resonate more strongly, especially when she revealed her own sad past to us. But somehow, these scenes felt more like a dispassionate reportage than a personal heartrending admission. The only part where her feelings came out genuinely was in her love for the children’s home and Mercy.

The same goes for Kacey as well, though in their case, their nonbinary gender identity offers a greater scope for inclusive discussions. I wish the other kids in the story also had stronger and lengthier roles, but they flit in and out of the narrative as needed. Given the cover, I had expected multiple children to be dominant in the storyline.

Mercy is probably the best character of the book for me. The Southern Ohio Children’s Home comes across as a caring and safe place for all its young residents, and as its head, Mercy is the best guardian and guide to these youngsters. I love how she is fair and kind but also disciplined. There are a few other appealing secondary characters as well. I also appreciate how the story doesn’t take the stereotypical route towards the portrayal of orphans and children’s homes, focussing more on the joys than on the tribulations of the kids.

The hidden diary subplot left me somewhat disappointed. The reveals were intriguing, I admit. But the mystery itself is lacklustre and its main reveal, disappointingly vague. Furthermore, as the diaries had been written by an older adult character, it contained several issues that don’t normally pop up in middle-grade novels and might not be age-appropriate. That said, I truly appreciate how Willa mentions that the diary contains several nondescript entries as well, but she was noting only the ones that were connected to the “mystery”. I have never read a book that acknowledged that a found diary also contains mundane entries. This is so much more realistic! I also love that the diary entries are formatted in an elegant calligraphy-like typeface that looks like actual handwriting. (I hope kids can still read cursive!)

The small-town setting is used fairly well in the plot, especially in the depiction of the residents and their knowledge of most past events. This lends to the plot a somewhat ‘historical’ feel, but this isn't necessarily a negative.

The biggest problem of the novel is what I have long called the ‘kitchen sink syndrome’, a common issue with debut novels trying to include every important theme under the sun into a single plot. This story incorporates several themes such as gender identity, drug abuse, parental abandonment, orphan experience, social discrimination, menstruation, indigenous land issues, first crush, abusive reform schools, and more. There’s a character preferring the they/them pronouns, a character using headphones to escape his mental demons, a character with Down Syndrome… Excellent representation, no doubt. But the count of topics is way too much for a single story, a middle-grade one at that! As such, the plot feels very cluttered.

Moreover, most of the themes are emotionally intense and socially oriented. So there is a lot of preachiness in the plot. After a point, it feels like the story is bombarding us with social awareness messages on everything from drugs to pronoun preferences. When there are too many points coming from a single story, the individual truisms lose their value. I wish the book had stuck to limited themes. Drug abuse and gender identity struggles are, by themselves, extensive topics. There was no need to add many more dark themes to the story. There are some really beautiful, thought-provoking lines in the story, but thanks to the heavy-handedness of the writing, their impact is diluted.

One of the included topics is a pet peeve of mine, so this point of feedback might not be for everyone: I absolutely hate it when young girls are told on their first menstruation that they aren’t girls anymore but women. The onset of the menstrual cycle might indicate a major biological milestone, but that alone doesn’t justify a girl to be called a woman. Changing the label to ‘woman’ puts different expectations and mental pressures on young girls who are still learning to understand the physical changes in their body. Let’s allow them to be girls who happen to menstruate, please.

Unfortunately, the editing also doesn’t work entirely in favour of the book. There are no typos, which I much appreciate. But Willa’s first-person narrative is too colloquial. This might be indicative of her ‘teen-ness’ and of the local vernacular, but I am not a fan of overly colloquial language in middle-grade fiction. Several children might consider such usage correct without realising that Willa’s grammar is faulty. There is also a lot of repetition in some phrases. For instance, the phrase "crisis in our community" to indicate the opioid issue comes up sixteen times over the course of the book. The most bewildering is Willa’s consistent use of the full name of “Southern Ohio Children's Home” almost every time she refers to the place – 99 times in all! If she genuinely loves the home and considers it her actual long-term residence, why isn't she simply calling it ‘home’? A final, relatively minor issue: I wish a ‘Meredith’ and a ‘Mercy’ weren’t key characters in the same book. Names beginning from similar syllables get confusing for me.

Overall, while there are several things this debut indie work does right, there are also several things it could have finetuned to make a better impact on me. I liked the characters and the intent, but the cramming in of too many themes and the slightly flat and unaddressed mystery ensured the lowering of my rating.

Officially, this is upper-middle-grade fiction (10-12 years). But given some troubling scenes and the drug-related abuse and death, this might work as a better option for older teens (12-15 years). Then again, teens do not like reading books in which the protagonist is much younger than them. So I don’t know if Willa’s age of eleven might turn some teens away from the book. This issue (and also the issue of Willa’s not sounding her age) could have been solved if Willa were said to be thirteen instead of eleven: just a change of two years but makes a big difference at that age.

Recommended to teens looking for slightly darker but inclusive storylines.

My thanks to the author and Mission Point Press for providing the DRC of “Orphanland” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.