The Yellow Train

All routes lead to stunning vistas in this rail-riding fantasy originally published in France. ""One dark night"" a boy joins his conductor grandfather on Grandpa's Yellow Train. As the duo steams across the country, the boy sees the landscape of the past, vast and undeveloped--the way the land looked before Grandpa and his train helped to settle it. A Yeti helps push the Yellow Train through snowdrifts; the slightly more ominous-looking Snake People, heavily painted men on horseback, give chase. But by story's end, the boy is snug in bed, and awakens clasping the keys to the Yellow Train and remembering the secret midnight ride with his grandfather. Highet recalls similarly themed voyages like Chris Van Allsburg's The Polar Express and Paul Fleischman's Time Train in this adaptation of a work by Fred Bernard. The text's dreamy tone and stop-and-start pacing pull readers into the unusual, imaginative trip, but a few holes in the plot are sure to provoke questions. Roca's striking, oversize paintings suggest advertising posters of the 1930s and '40s. His dusky palette and dizzying perspectives result in larger-than-life images of mountains, skyscrapers and jungle greenery. Ages 7-up. (Sept.)