All Aboard!

August 18, 2014
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.

September 1, 2014
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 and...MORE!" 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)

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