By Marla Frazee
Twelve people get in the queue for a roller coaster and one of them has never been on one before.
The line is long and Frazee draws you every single person in it, so you can pick out the loud man in the singlet and the two who are pretending to be fine. Then she tells you the thing the book runs on: at least one of these people has never been on a roller coaster before. Not ever. And you spend the rest of the queue trying to work out which one. They get in. The bar comes down. And then the climb starts, and it takes spread after spread after spread, clacking up, everyone's face changing a little at a time, the park getting small underneath them. The book gets slower and slower and slower. And then you turn the page.
There are barely any words, which means a child who cannot yet read is doing the same work as everyone else: watching faces, tracking one person through a crowd, feeling the pace change. Frazee makes the physical act of turning a page do the job that a paragraph would do in a novel, so a class discovers that the book itself is a machine with moving parts. Children who think they have nothing to say about a story have a great deal to say about this one, because it happened to their stomach.