They
stoke the boiler, stow the luggage, and when hills are steep, they even get
out and push. That's right, the thrill-seeking daredevil dinosaurs from Dinosailors
are back, and now they're riding a train. But this train is more like a roller
coaster--up, down, and faster and faster, until the dinos realize the brakes
are out!
Laughs and thrills abound in this rip-snorting tale of reckless reptiles
and their runaway train.
Deb Lund has created another dinovoyage of epic proportions, an outrageous journey that finds a dinomite match in the equally outlandish art of Howard Fine.
"This follow-up to Dinosailors follows the transportation-crazed reptiles
as they work on and ride the rails. Once the dinocrew (wearing jaunty
railroad caps) has loaded up the train with "Coal and lumber, oil
and grain" and the prehistoric passengers have boarded (they ride
atop the cars since they're far too big to fit inside), the train departs
from its station on the plains and heads for the mountains. Fine renders
his scenes of goofy, grinning and occasionally overall-wearing dinosaurs
with a hilarious sense of skewed elegance-the painterly brushstrokes
and luminous, almost romantic pastel hues make the pictures seem like
natural history museum murals as imagined by a daft paleontologist. As
in the first dino-tale, the journey soon devolves into a series of comic
mishaps. At one point the scaly fellows get out to push the train (" 'We
think we can!' they dinosay"), and they end up soaking wet and huddled
together on a single handcar for the trip back home, swearing, "We'll
never take another train..." However, they hint that their traveling
days are not over ("But how about a dinoplane -"). While not
quite as rollicking an adventure as Dinosailors (or as gross), there's
plenty of slapstick fun in these pages, and Lund shows no sign of exhausting
her supply of dino-hybrid words (a "dinostoker" shovels coal
while the train's engine "coughs and dinochugs") Whether youngsters
are fans of trains, T-rexes or both, they'll find this outing dino-mite.
Ages 3-7." - Reed Business Information, January 2006