Review by Booklist Review
A mother and daughter walk along a plane made of a simple line to board a waiting train. The little girl's journey to visit her grandmother starts out in the vaulted, crowded lines of the city, replete with grids of windows and billboards, and continues onward, slowly stripping the simple black lines away, layer by layer. The train cruises by industrial areas, highways, and suburbs, over lakes and fields, and even through gentle, unaggressively fantastical environments, before letting the girl off at a rural station, where her grandmother waits to take her home across that same simple line. The delicate, complex, and utterly enthralling line work serves to exemplify the power and clarity of the visuals, offering a mathematically precise picture of environments without sacrificing beauty or wonder. The girl offers quietly thoughtful narration, dreaming of exploring the world despite the doubts of her adults, even as the bright green and orange train speeds her along like a blazing engine of imagination. Beyond a uniquely gorgeous piece of art, Line 135 has numerous and unusual curricular possibilities, from neighborhood studies to urban planning, from art classes to design, like a line of visual possibility that extends into the infinite horizon.--Karp, Jesse Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A sleek lime-and-orange train bisects spindly b&w landscapes, carrying a girl to her grandmother's house, in a story that trades the ultra-tall format of this team's recent Sky High for an exaggerated horizontal trim size. The girl's head is just visible in one of the train's windows. "When you move between two places, it's called traveling," she explains. She uses the journey to think. "One day," she vows, "I will travel everywhere.... I will know the entire world." Her family is evidently less enthusiastic: "My mother and my grandmother say that I am too small to know the entire world." Albertine's graceful lines are all of perfectly even weight; the white pages look as if a ball of string has been unspooled on them. The scenery echoes the girl's sense of adventure, growing imperceptibly more surreal as the journey goes on; cityscapes give way to swamps full of alien plant life and fields of bland, elephantine creatures. Zullo captures the girl's final resolve with sensitivity: "My mother and my grandmother have forgotten what I have always known: It is possible." Ages 4-6. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
K-Gr 2-Line 135 relates the physical and emotional journey of a child as she travels via elevated train from her home in the city to her grandmother's country home. "There are two places I belong in the world" she tells readers as she boards the Day-Glo green and orange train, which provides the only color among the delicately outlined black-and-white scenery. The exquisite line work and sense of whimsy are reminiscent of Edward Gorey's style minus the macabre. The narrator's tiny face is visible in the window as the train travels through landscapes both mundane and surreal. As the youngster progresses, she relates her intentions to know the world despite being told that she's too young and naive to desire such a thing. Children will relate to the narrator as she both yearns to understand the adult world and determines to pave her own path. The first page is blank except for a pair of small figures holding hands and marching along the horizon line; the youngster leads the way, eagerly gesturing forward toward the rest of the story. On the final spread, the same spare layout provides readers a place to reflect as the girl joyfully follows her grandmother and gestures backward to where she came from. Pair this book with Frank Viva's Along a Long Road (Little, Brown, 2011) for two truly elegant linear journeys, both of which provide a breath of fresh air to picture-book collections.-Anna Haase Krueger, Ramsey County Library, White Bear Lake, MN (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
While a little girl rides a train to her grandmother's house in the country, she ruminates on her dream to "know the entire world." Precocious children will be absorbed by her musings; parents will shudder to see a small child traveling alone by rail. The lime-green train ferries the girl through horizontally long black-and-white scapes that have the meticulous look of blueprints. (c) Copyright 2013. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The witty minimalism of the black-and-white line artwork by Swiss illustrator Albertine in this extreme landscape-format children's book belies the psychological depth of the content. A child is traveling by train from her mother's home in the city to her grandmother's home, which is "practically on the other side of the world." The train, the only color element of the whole book, moves through a landscape that begins as a modern European cityscape (plenty of signs in French for language practice!) and increasingly becomes more surreal and Seuss-ian as the landscape becomes more rural. The story is a gently veiled moral tale of resolution and independence. In spite of the admonitions of her mother and grandmother, who tell her that it is impossible to know the whole world, the child asserts that she intends to travel everywhere, and thus she will be able to know the whole world. Her assertions of independence and determination gain momentum as the train continues. The fact that the train does arrive at its far-distant destination, reuniting the girl with her grandmother, suggests that the child is right and that adults are too rigid in their thinking. Readers will thrill to the sense of discovery and exploration the girl experiences: "It is possible." (Picture book. 2-4)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
