By Sherri Duskey Rinker
A night train pulls in and a crew of animals loads each car and then curls up to sleep, all in a soft rhyme built to carry your child down with it.
A steam train comes gliding into a dark station, and one by one the cars get loaded by a crew of animals. Elephants pile the hopper car with sand, a polar bear packs the reefer car with ice cream, monkeys throw toys into the box car, dinosaurs load the flatcar. Each animal does its job and then softly winds down for the night, until the whole train is full and drifting on through the dark. It's a dream, it turns out, and the soft rhyme and the slowing pace are built to send a child to sleep the same way the train is drifting off.
It feeds the train obsession and empties the tank at the same time. Your child gets a real freight train with every car named and a different animal working it, which is plenty to pore over, and the book is deliberately paced to run down toward sleep, so it earns its keep at the exact moment you need a train book that ends the day rather than winds it up. The rhyme is steady and the pictures glow in the dark blues of nighttime, which makes it a natural last read before the light goes off.