The Best Orphan Stories for Kids

A foster child seeks trust and belonging in a new home.

War empties a village, and a boy of eight walks a thousand miles at the head of thirty-five other boys with no adults left to lead them.

Four newly orphaned children hide from the grandfather they have been taught to fear and make a home out of an abandoned boxcar.

A young orphan girl is sent to live with an elderly brother and sister on a farm in Prince Edward Island.

A boarding-school favorite loses everything the day word arrives that her father has died, and is put to work in the attic.

Orphaned by an improbable accident and handed to two horrible aunts, a boy escapes inside a peach the size of a house.

Orphaned by an epidemic and shipped to an uncle who does not want her, a sour girl finds the key to a garden locked for ten years.

A fire leaves three children orphaned, wealthy, and in the care of a distant relative interested only in the money.

A girl who has run from every foster home she has been given lands with an elderly artist whose memory is failing, and decides to protect her.

When a child goes missing, a town that has forgotten how to be kind blames the giant living at its edge — and the children of the orphanage set out to prove it wrong.

Newly orphaned, three children are evacuated out of wartime London with private instructions to find a family willing to keep them.

Orphaned young and unwilling to stay where he was sent, a boy runs until he becomes a legend in a town divided by a street nobody crosses.

A foster child must choose between her past and a new family life.

A boy raised by ghosts must face dangers beyond the graveyard.