By Brian Floca
Summer 1869: a mother and her two children ride the new transcontinental railroad from Omaha to Sacramento, and the book takes the whole train apart to show you how it runs.
The rails have just been joined, and suddenly the country is a week wide instead of a season wide. A mother and her two children get on at Omaha to cross it and meet their father on the other side. Floca writes the whole thing in the second person, so it's your ticket and your seat. Then he opens the engine up. There's the fireman, shoveling two tons of coal with his back. There's the water turning to steam, where the steam goes, what it pushes. There's the engineer with his hand on it, and the brakeman running along the roof of a moving train in the dark, because that's how they stopped it. There's what you eat and how little time you get to eat it. There's the privy, which drops straight onto the track, a page children tend to flip back to. And there's what happens if the boiler lets go, which is that it lets go. Plains, mountains, tunnels, desert, and then Sacramento.
Most railroad books give a child the achievement: the golden spike, the two engines nose to nose. This one gives them the work instead. Somebody is shoveling, somebody is walking the roof of a moving train, somebody is watching a pressure gauge, and if any one of them stops paying attention, people die. The train ends up feeling like a machine full of tired, careful people rather than a triumph, and that's what tends to hold a child who usually wants nothing to do with history. It's also the book for the child who asks how something works and won't take a summary.