I CAN MAKE A TRAIN NOISE

A child’s abundant imagination transforms a coffee shop into an adventure on an intercity train.

The child, bundled up in winter attire, enters a coffee shop with parents and a baby sibling. The shop is nestled under a railway bridge abutment; as the family enters the shop, a train zooms by overhead. This prompts the child to say: “I can make a train noise.” The child repeats this with increasing enthusiasm, imagining everyone in the shop standing and lining up like cars on a train. Next, the walls of the shop become a train; the condiments on the table become the buildings it passes; and the child is at the train’s controls. The child repeatedly chants, “I can make a train noise, now, now” or a variation thereof. Changes in type size and placement, punctuation, and sentence rhythm are employed to mimic the train’s speed, making this a story that begs to be read aloud. The spreads are filled with details; scenes in the cafe give readers peeks at people’s thoughts via speech bubbles filled with visuals. Assured lines convey the horizontal movement of the train, which makes for compelling page-turns. The clipped pace of the narrative delights. Readers may be left wondering how much of the adventure springs from the child’s imagination—the concluding cafe scene is slyly suggestive. The child and family are White; the cafe is filled with people with a range of skin colors. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Exhilarating.