Night Train, Night Train

Dear fellow readers, it’s been a while since I settled down for a chat with you all about just a beautiful picture book. I’ve missed that! So let’s rectify that situation, shall we?

Meet Night Train, Night Train by Robert Burleigh and illustrated by Wendell Minor. It’s quite a new book, just published in October by the ever-fabulous Charlesbridge. It has been a while since I have met with such a visually stunning book and I am eager to share it with you.

This is quite a young picture book, geared towards toddlers and up (the Charlesbridge website says ages 2-5, and I defer to their expertise), but that doesn’t make it any less sophisticated, particularly to the adult eye.

The book itself is a nostalgia trip: it’s set, as the illustrator’s note in the back explains, in the 30’s or 40’s, with a small child riding a Dreyfuss Hudson locomotive. The child, accompanied by a teddy bear, rides the train through the night, all in black and white and shades of grey, occasionally punctuated by a gleam of colour. (Long-time readers of the blog will recollect exactly how much I love a muted grey-black-white palette punctuated by the occasional bright splash of colour: The Tea Party in the Woods and First Snow spring to mind.) As the train and the child dash along through the night they witness, among other sights, a “big blue window like an eye,” and as the night progresses and the child is lulled to sleep, “Eyelids flutter. Nod. Lean back. Rattle. Rumble. Down the track.” Finally, as the child sleeps, the light and colour gradually increase until, with morning, the train pulls into the station, and the child and teddy step out at their destination in a bright world of colour.

As I emphasized above, the gradual transition from dark, greyscale night, whisking through splashes of colour, and on into a world of soft yet brilliant colours will captivate any child’s eye and be appealing to every adult reading with them.

But the strength of the book isn’t only visual; it’s aural, as well. Just as the illustrations are muted yet brilliant, the words are quiet yet potent. I want to say that it’s “poetic,” but I don’t want to be misunderstood. The book isn’t exactly a unified, narrative poem; it’s not even a Jamberry. But rhythm, rhyme, and plain old sound effects mark it strongly and attract the tongue and the ear as much as the not-quite-black-and-white pictures attract the eye. Together, sound and sight make this book an absolute treat, and I want to bring back the word I used above to emphasize the point: this book is sophisticated. Instead of carving away everything of essence about trains to make it “childlike,” this book takes the child audience seriously and carries the reader right into the essence of the train ride. It’s like Freight Train (a childhood favourite of mine) at an art show.

Simply put, I adore this book. It’s fresh, new, original– and yet it’s a total nostalgia trip for a world I never knew yet somehow remember through its pages. It’s a joy to read: exquisite to the eye and a dream for the ear.

The copy I bought today is earmarked for someone else, and I’m so sad about that that I just know what’s going to happen… and I bet so do you. Freight Train has earned itself a companion on the bookshelf!