TWO LITTLE TRAINS

Brown’s adorable bouncing rhyme about trains has been inventively re-imagined by two award-winning illustrators. A silver “streamlined train” puffs off to the West, while a tiny toy train is its echo and shadow in a comfortable, warmly kid-inhabited home. When the silver train goes through the hill, the toy train chugs through a tunnel made of a book called Hills; the toy train climbs the mountain of the stair banister as the silver train climbs the mountains “beyond the plain”; and the silver train’s track is echoed in the fringe of a rug for the toy. The Dillons illustrate both the charming domestic interiors and the sweep of landscape with elegant geometric forms, colors of great depth and richness, and their magical touch: the man in the moon is the “black man singing in the West.” The relationship between the two trains is also illuminated on the cover, where, next to the silver train sits a set of luggage with a beribboned gift whose box is stamped with the image of the toy train. That box is unwrapped on the title and half-title pages. Often tending toward the lush and extravagant, here the artists have chosen exactly the right expression of pure and simple art to accompany the equally uncomplicated rhyme. Sure to delight yet another generation of children. (Picture book. 3-7)