The Golden Swift

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So fat lot of good that did. To everybody else she just looked as plain and ordinary as she always had. I like that you get to see more of Kate's day-to-day life in between trips on the trains and that you see Kate and Tom interacting with other children. Kate is entering middle school, and I think her feelings about school and fitting in accurately reflect what many children feel at that age. Complaint number one: Leading a double life was nowhere near as easy as it looked. Before all this happened she hadn’t even been that good at leading one life, and now that she had two they had a way of getting tangled up with each other. Problems from one life had a way of following you into the other one and vice versa. For example, Kate was always worrying about a social studies quiz when she should’ve been rescuing a sugar glider from a bushfire in Australia, and then in class when she was trying to remember the cause of the French Revolution (it was poverty), her brain would suddenly choose to worry about how chimney swifts were running out of chimneys to build their nests in. And what was even the point of leading a double life if you couldn’t use one to run away from the other? Four was that as hard as she worked on the Silver Arrow, as many animals as she helped, as hard as she tried, it was never, ever enough. There were always more animals in trouble. Kate read a lot, and in her experience stories with magic in them usually ended up with the world being saved at the end. But this was different. Kate tried and tried, and was brave, and never gave up, and generally acted like a hero, and still the world wasn’t saved.

But it wasn’t one of those adventures that happens once and then you have to remember and savor and treasure it for the rest of your otherwise uneventful life. Since her birthday, Kate and Tom had gone on about a dozen trips on the Silver Arrow. At first she’d tried to keep a journal of them, but that had lasted about a trip and a half before she got lazy about it, and then some rabbits ate it, so that was that. She guessed she just wasn’t a journal-keeping person. But she’d helped hundreds of animals get where they needed to go, or get away from whatever they needed to get away from, or find whomever or whatever they were looking for. She’d ridden the Silver Arrow down deep tunnels, across luminous blue glacier crevasses, past secret vine-covered temples deep in sweltering equatorial rain forests. On her 11th birthday, Kate's Uncle Herbert gifted her a train (no, not a model train, a REAL one!). She and her brother, Tom, had many adventures with their uncle in the first book of the series, The Silver Arrow. I encourage readers to begin with the first novel to fully understand the Great Secret Intercontinental Railroad before reading the sequel, The Golden Swift by Lev Goldman. The attempts to return animals to where they originated does not go well, unsurprisingly, and there are consequences to the children as well as the animals and magical trains. It turns out that everything in nature is connected, and if you pull out one piece, it all starts falling apart. Children with magical talking steam trains are thrilled by their clever new plan to rescue endangered animals.

Grossman spins a tale that weaves environmental awareness and protection with fantasy. Middle grade readers will learn about a wide variety of species and see how interconnected we all are. So this year when she saw the poster announcing auditions for Anything Goes, Kate signed up immediately. It wasn’t even a decision. She knew exactly which part she wanted, namely Hope Harcourt, beguiling young heiress.

Rest assured, all your subscriptions, whether monthly or yearly, will be matched accordingly. Your My Fleets and Tags, along with your Credit Points, will also be transferred to your new MarineTraffic account. Additionally, we will assist you in smoothly transferring your My Zones.Kate was crouched in the cab of the Silver Arrow, sweating from the heat, her knees aching, as she scraped and shoved around inside its firebox with a ridiculously long-handled rake to try to get the fire going. It was hard work, and it wasn’t helping that the Silver Arrow was giving her a hard time while she did it. They meet another conductor, Jag, who works with the Golden Swift, a different train, who is not only moving animals around the world, as Kate is doing, but is also attempting to return certain creatures to their original habitats. Interestingly, Jag also goes to Kate's school, and made the school musical, so Kate’s a little annoyed with him. That had nothing to do with the Silver Arrow, but she was still annoyed about it, so she put it on the list.

My favorite character in the books remains the Silver Arrow itself. Its printouts add levity and humor to the story. Or good-ish, anyway. Her uncle Herbert has gone missing, and the worsening climate means that there are more and more animals that need help all the time. How many times does Kate have to save the world before it stays saved? And finally, complaint number five was that she couldn’t even go out on the Silver Arrow anymore because Uncle Herbert had disappeared! He was the one who gave Kate her missions. That was how things were done. But she hadn’t seen him for two months, and no one—not Tom, not their parents, not the Silver Arrow, not the porcupine who lived in the woods behind her house—had any idea what had happened to him. One thing I like about Lev Grossman is that he doesn't make things easy. While of course the Silver Arrow is a simpler set of books than The Magicians, it would have been easy to make the Golden Swift another simple fun adventure about rescuing very nice animals.

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Some awkward diction and phrasing in some parts made this not as good of a read-aloud as the first book. Not much happens in either plot or character development and the whole thing left me feeling meh. Goldman's premise is an interesting one with excitement and creative problem solving and definite maturing of the characters. I just wish readers were not also fed a particular notion of science and politics at the same time. Is this one of those times when you know something I don’t, but you’re not just coming out and saying it?” Well, okay,” Tom said. “But I’m sure their trampoline isn’t bad. Trampolines are innocent. They know nothing of good and evil.”