Review by Booklist Review
From the duo who brought you What Can a Crane Pick Up? (2012) comes another captivating machine story for youngsters. The infectious trainlike rhythm of the verses follows cheery locomotives, their cargo, and passengers on a long journey. The train cars snake through landscapes and glide past exciting sights, while the text is punctuated by a freight car's worth of catchy train sounds: A warning! CLANG, CLANG / as the train scoots along. / A CLATTER-AND-CHUG / in its rumbling song. Though some of the terms might be a little tricky for the littlest train fans to grasp, the friendly and cartoonish illustrations of smiley trains and passengers, along with some vocabulary guidance from a grown-up, will rope them in. The chugga-chugga beat and appealing anthropomorphized trains will charm young train-lovers in this entertaining title that's a perfect fit for storytime.--Miller, Annie Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Dotlich and Lowery sang the praises of an oft-overlooked piece of machinery in What Can a Crane Pick Up? There's significantly more competition out there for this companion title about train travel, but Dotlich's buoyant rhymes and Lowery's loose cartooning and manically drawn text supply plenty of personality. "Trains whistle through prairies,/ a long, steel sweep./ Through thunder and wind,/ they have schedules to keep," reads one spread, as Lowery's lightly anthropomorphized train whistles to itself under a dark sky-smiling down at the train is a single nonthreatening storm cloud, a bolt of yellow lighting dangling like a dog's tail. It's a lighthearted ode to the landscape trains traverse, the cargo they carry, and the joy of seeing the sights while riding the rails. Ages 2-5. Agent: Deborah Warren, East West Literary Agency. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Rhyming verse chugs along as two children ride a train on a long-distance trip. Across prairies and through ghost towns, up mountains and past cities, the train takes these two kids to summer camp. Dotlich's verse and meter are characteristically solid and humorous: "He tips his hat. / You step through the door. / A yap a yawn a burp a snore / There's people and people and people andMORE!" But there's something meandering about this trip. The children board and look around, and then the text veers quickly into a catalog of cargo that doesn't happen to be on this particular train: foodstuffs, tractors, lumber, rocks and livestock. Alarmingly, a rooster falls out of the cattle car, never to be seen again. This is an exceptionally long train trip, judging from the terrain it traverses, but there is no sense of the passage of time. Lowery's thick-lined illustrations have a friendly, childlike look, but unfortunately, only Caucasian people seem to be riding this 21st-century train. Possibly the book's biggest liability, however, is the hand-lettered text, which makes reading aloud and tracking scansion something of a challenge on many spreads. There are many better train books available; point little engineers in their direction. (Picture book. 3-6) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
