Review of Two Little Trains
Children often quickly come to understand how confusing that moment between awake and asleep can really be. Sadly, it is often the case that they find out the difference between dreams and the real world the hard way: by waking up, sweat drenched, from a terrible nightmare. But if a parent thinks ahead, they can get their child to think about that line between asleep and awake, or that hazy line between make believe and real. How, you may ask? By reading Two Little Trains, by Margaret Wise Brown with illustrations by Leo and Diane Dillon.
Two trains, a streamlined train and an old-fashioned train, race along the tracks towards their destinations. On the left hand side of the page, the streamlined train puffs its way across the land. On the right hand page, the old-fahioned toy train chugs its way through the lower portion of a two-story house before making the long climb to a child's bedroom. Although it is apparent to the reader that these two trains are, for all intents and purposes, different, this is not so for the sleeping child we meet at the end of the story. For that child, the slow meandering chug of the old-fashioned train is the same as the puff of the streamlined train. For the child, that half-awake/half-asleep time provides a brief chance to enjoy one last bit of playtime before it’s time to once again close heavy eyelids and allow sleep to come.
Brown, always a master of cadence, has rendered another text that, like Goodnight Moon, encourages the reader to slow down and keep pace with the story. In this case, children puff and chug along with the trains as they push onward through rain (or a shower), a desert (or a broom and dustpan), and mountains (or a book entitled “Hills” resting like a tent on the floor) until they reach their blue expanse of a destination, the passenger train its ocean and the toy train a large blue bedspread covering a sleeping child.
As the story progresses we see that Two Little Trains has something else in common with Goodnight Moon. Both stories are obviously about different settings and situations, but both also act as “quiet down” style stories perfect for lulling those bad nappers into a more relaxed state. Not only does the cadence keep pace for the child, but the rhythm and meter simulates the sound of a train passing over tracks by using a 1:2 count: “Two little trains went down the track, Two little trains going west.” By the end of the story, the wording is such that it takes a little longer to read each line. The ‘sh’ sound in “The ocean was big, the ocean was blue” on the last page is a soothing quiet-down noise, and when read correctly, that ‘sh’ noise read in a near whisper is the perfect lullaby for little sleepy ears.
Two Little Trains should satisfy train lovers in every household, young and old, and it should leave the ones uneasy about make believe a little more anxious to try it, right before going to bed. For children aged 2 to 6.
