The Silver Arrow

Kate and her little brother are bored. Their parents are boring. They are sensible to the point of being just plain dull. Who isn't dull? Uncle Herbert. Apparently he's very irresponsible. Filthy rich, but irresponsible. Kate has never even met him. But, with her 11th birthday approaching, she decides to write him a letter. She's hoping he'll spend some of his riches on a fabulous present for her.

Needless to say, she is completely stunned when he sends her a steam train. Not a toy train, a real train. Her parents are furious, but she needs an adventure.

This is a fun, whimsical book that also has an important message in it. Want to know the message? You'll have to read it.

I really enjoyed the narrator. I think middle grade books really need an engaging narrator given the target audience. I loved the voices for Kate, and the animals.

I received a copy from Net Galley. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

★ ★ ★ 1/2 (rounded up)
This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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You really don't appreciate how incredibly colossal a steam locomotive is till one shows up parked on the street in front of your house. This one was about fifteen feet high and fifty feet long, and it had a headlight and a smokestack and a bell and a whole lot of pipes and pistons and rods and valve handles on it. The wheels alone were twice her height.

THE SILVER ARROW

The Silver Arrow

Life always seemed so interesting in books, but then when you had to actually live it nothing all that interesting ever seemed to happen. And unlike in books, you couldn't skip ahead past the boring parts.

The Chronicles of Narnia

Narnia

The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles

The Phantom Tollbooth

Tollbooth

Narnia

Deep in her heart Kate knew that. She knew that her problems weren't real problems, at least not compared with the kinds of problems kids had in stories. She wasn't being beaten, or starved, or forbidden to go to a royal ball, or sent into the woods by an evil stepparent to get eaten by wolves. She wasn't even an orphan! Weirdly, Kate sometimes caught herself actually wishing she had a problem like that-a zombie apocalypse, or an ancient curse, or an alien invasion, anything really-so that she could be a hero and survive and triumph against all the odds and save everybody.

The Phantom Tollbooth

The Silver Arrow

THE SILVER ARROW

She'd almost forgotten that the train could talk. There's a lot going on in your life when you have more urgent things to think about than a talking train.

For me, this was fine. It definitely brought to mind the kind of...pragmatic whimsy of a Roald Dahl (but without the antisemitism and fatshaming). It ended up also feeling a little didactic about environmentalism but like, you know, he's not wrong, and also that kind of story appeals to a lottt of elementary school-age readers who I think will really dig this. But if you're coming to this looking for the kind of gritty complexity of [b:The Magicians 6101718 The Magicians (The Magicians, #1) Lev Grossman https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1313772941l/6101718.SY75.jpg 6278977], I mean, it's definitely not here because this is not that kind of book. This is a book for young children. And that's fine. I personally probably wouldn't have picked this up if it were by an author who I wasn't already a fan of, but the story will sell itself to kids who aren't familiar with Grossman's work for adults.