Review by New York Times Review
TRAINS ARE BIG, strong, fast, loud. Just like America. Trains typically get in trouble when they're not moving forward. Just like America. They're romantic, too - again, just like America, or at least the idea of America. So it's no wonder that trains, whether as symbols of might or restlessness, have played such an iconic role in our popular culture, from the folk tale "John Henry" to such songs as "Mystery Train" and "500 Miles," to films as varied as "The General," "North by Northwest" and "Before Sunrise." But who loves trains more than kids? You'd think there would be a surfeit of whistleblowing, wheels-aturning classics in the picture-book section, shelves and shelves of them, right up there with bunny books and princesses. Trains are so wonderfully graphic, too, slashing across landscapes and barreling full speed ahead to force dramatic perspectives - after all, what is a train but a line on steroids? Funny, though, I can think of only a couple of genuine picture-book classics starring locomotives: "The Little Engine That Could" and "The Polar Express" - and maybe I should also include "Green Eggs and Ham," because as a rule, one should always include "Green Eggs and Ham." ("I will not eat them in the rain. I will not eat them on a train.") Oh, right, I'm forgetting "Thomas the Tank Engine," the multimedia phenomenon. Or rather, as the father of a son who once had 40 miles of Thomas track, I'm blocking his dutiful memory. Leave it to the English to neuter trains and turn them into civil servants with wheels. Happily, we have three new American train books to consider here. I'm not sure any are future classics, but all are first-rate; and one, "Locomotive," by Brian Floca, is the very deserving winner of a 2013 New York Times Best Illustrated Books Award. "Locomotive" tells the story of a family's 1869 journey across America on the newly completed transcontinental railroad. A mother and two children serve as our surrogates on this trip, but they are essentially extras in a book whose star is the train itself, from steam engine to caboose, along with everyone and everything that keeps it thundering down the track toward Californ-eye-ay. Floca, whose previous books include "Moonshot" and "Lightship," seems intent on doing for modes of transport what David Macaulay has done for cathedrals, castles and pyramids. "Locomotive" incorporates many dollops of technical detail about 19th-century railroading, but while flirting at times with book-report dryness, Floca mostly keeps things vivid. Mordant humor helps: "Here's what they say about switchmen: / You can tell that one is new to the job / if he still has all his fingers." "Locomotive" is unusual for a picture book in that it is intended to please a fairly wide age group, which means it may also frustrate some readers or listeners. Older children will appreciate the wealth of detail and history, while younger ones will be entranced by the appropriately chugga-chugga rhythm of Floca's free verse and his abundant use of sound effects (playfully emphasized with well-muscled, 19th-century-style typefaces): "Now comes the locomotive!/The iron horse, the great machine! / Fifty feet and forty tons /Hear the clear, hard call of her bell:/CLANG-CLANG! CLANG-CLANG! CLANG-CLANG! / Hear the HISSSSSSSSS and the SPIT of the steam!/Hear the engine breathe like a beast: / HUFF HUFF HUFF! " Of course, the risk is that younger readers might get bored by, say, the digression on braking protocol, while older children will find the clang-clang business babyish. But everyone - parents, too - will be thrilled to learn how a train toilet worked in 1869. (It sat atop a simple hole; not polite to use while in a station.) Everyone will be even more thrilled by Floca's illustrations. He's a brilliant, exacting draftsman; he also knows how to give his pictures a cinematic energy, especially in the way he "cuts" from page to page. A spread showing the train crossing a rickety wooden bridge uses a funny visual trick to jolt your eyeballs along with the passengers. Flipping through this book made me smile with pleasure before I even read it. Elisha Cooper's "Train" updates "Locomotive" by taking a contemporary, more impressionistic cross-country journey, one that begins in a New York City for which Cooper has imagined a far more graceful point of embarkation than the miserable, smelly dungeon that is our real-life Penn Station. (Memo to self: idea for Gothic romance set in the haunted bowels of Penn Station - "The Hunchback of New Jersey Transit"?) Cooper's trip starts with a commuter train, segues to a passenger train, then a freight train, and so on, until we find ourselves on a futuristic bullet train whizzing optimistically into a fanciful San Francisco terminus that looks as if it were designed by Eero Saarinen. Cooper's prose is more restrained than Floca's, but just as vivid and often singing with poetic specificity. I love this passage: "As the train approaches a rail crossing, it sounds like a storm. As the train passes, it sounds like dropped pots and pans. As the train leaves, it sounds like the da dum da dum of a beating heart. Then, silence." Cooper's illustrations have a similar feel, detailed yet impressionistic - no mean feat. I saved my favorite for last. "How to Train a Train" is exactly that: a guidebook that teaches children how to capture and tame wild trains. "First, get up really early in the morning and find a good hiding spot close to some trains. . . . As the sun rises, the trains will begin to stir and start their engines. Watch them work and play. It's only natural that you'll want to take home all the trains, but don't just grab the first one you see. Take your time and choose one that's right for you. Got one? Time to make your move." As you can tell, Jason Carter Eaton's deadpan prose is calibrated just-so. He wisely leaves the abundant belly laughs to John Rocco's paintings, which have their own zany style but also owe something to the absurdist scales and perspectives of the great Bruce McCall. Alarmed parents will be relieved to learn that trains make terrific pets, capable of learning tricks and amenable to baths, so next time the kids are begging, maybe skip the hamsters and go diesel. "How to Train a Train" doesn't deal with the ultimate pet-related question - mortality - but my advice is to parry any anxious queries with the old fib about sending it to a nice roundhouse upstate. BRUCE HANDY is a writer and editor at Vanity Fair.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 10, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Cooper (Homer, 2012) follows several trains going about their daily routine in this exhilarating glimpse of life on the rails. There's the red-striped Commuter Train pulling out of the station, heading out of the concrete jungle into town after town; as the Commuter Train waits at a station, a larger Passenger Train whooshes past, shuttling passengers between cities; at the rail yard next to Grand Central Station, a Freight Train loads its cargo and sloooowly pulls away; this train ambles past ( As if the train and the clouds were having a race to see which go slower ) an Overnight Train switchbacking westward to climb the Rocky Mountains; finally, there's the High-Speed Train, shaped like a bullet, its sleek nose pointing toward a city skyline. Throughout, there are Passengers on, passengers off. Cooper's languid, rolling language works well with the looseness of the watercolors, which offer spectacular views of trains as seen from a distance as well as interior close-ups of levers and dials. Each new train is introduced dramatically after a page turn, and details of train living, like sleeping and eating on an overnight car, should thrill the intended audience. The front and back matter depict many different people rushing to and fro, and a glossary and a facts section, along with a brief author's note, conclude. A poetic, beautifully conceived book it has the right amount of pomp and circumstance to make train travel sound just a little bit glamorous.--Kelley, Ann Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Riding the rails from New York City to San Francisco takes on an expansive definition when Cooper (Farm) sounds the "All aboard," bringing readers on five kinds of trains (commuter, passenger, freight, overnight, and, high-speed). To move this transcontinental journey along, Cooper mostly eschews the boarding and exiting process (although he does use a stop in Chicago to portray the soaring neoclassic grandeur of a city station). Instead, he transports his audience from one train to the next as they pass ("As the Commuter Train waits, another train roars past on another track.... A bright blue Passenger Train hurrying between cities"). Cooper's signature sun-bleached watercolors beautifully convey human achievements and nature's grandeur through both detail and a range of scale, whether it's an entire train passing through a rural landscape on a starry night, the control panel in the engineer's cab, or a comparatively tiny elk. Like Brian Floca's Locomotive, also out this month, this is more than a tribute to a mode of transport: it's also a valentine to the sweep of American geography and, in particular, the glory of the Great Plains. Ages 4-8. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Horn Book Review
As five different kinds of trains overtake each other, we travel with them one by one from east to west across the country. We experience each--commuter train, passenger train, freight train, overnight train, high-speed train--in its context, and Cooper makes sure we hear them, too. He describes the sound of the passenger train approaching "like a storm," passing "like dropped pots and pans," and leaving "like the da dum da dum of a beating heart." Cooper varies his composition throughout, at times showing close-up interiors, long landscapes with small details along the edges, or several vignettes on one spread. The illustrations are sketchy but detailed, ideal for children who like to spend plenty of time poring over the pages. As always, Cooper's focus isn't completely subject-centric. He's just as likely to show vignettes of rats along the bottom of the page ("Tracks weave in and out. Small animals scurry under the tracks"). After all, there's more to see in a train station than just the trains. lolly robinson (c) Copyright 2014. 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
Who can watch a train race by without longing to be on it? This delightful picture book delivers the literal and figurative rush of cross-country rail travel as it tracks a variety of trains, beginning with a New York commuter line and ending with a high-speed train pulling into a California terminal. Along the way, readers are treated to descriptions of the whizzing thrills of long-distance trains, including the sights, sounds and even aromas that passengers encounter inside and outside the cars. Thanks to clever narrative pacing and handsome design, children are invited to hop on for the ride. Punchy, clipped sentences, often enlivened with evocative onomatopoeic words, enhance the sense of movement. The text on the right-hand page of each spread ends in ellipses that demand rapid page turns, heightening the feel of forward momentum. The book's rectangular shape suggests a railroad car's appearance while also providing the illustrator ample space in which to present sweeping, panoramic views of ever-changing scenery and busy stations. The loose watercolor-and-pencil artwork hums with activity and energy; a nighttime scene is dramatic and beautiful. Cooper reminds readers of the anticipatory, ephemeral nature of rail travel by repeating the phrase "Passengers off, passengers on" and gracefully transitioning from train to train both visually and in the text. Kids will be all aboard for this one. (glossary, author's note) (Picture book. 4-8)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
