Locomotive

A mother and her two children ride a steam powered train across the newly completed transcontinental railroad in the summer of 1869, traveling from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California, and Brian Floca uses their journey to walk readers through everything that made the trip possible: the engineers and firemen keeping the locomotive running, the workers who built the line across mountains and plains, and the sheer scale of a landscape most passengers had never crossed before by any means faster than a wagon. Around the family's own trip, Floca folds in additional passages on the history of the locomotive itself, both what came before 1869 and what came after, so the book reads as both a specific family's journey and a broader account of how steam travel reshaped the country.

Written in loose free verse and illustrated in watercolor across an oversized format, the book shifts scale constantly, wide landscape spreads giving way to detailed cutaway diagrams of the engine's inner workings rendered clearly enough that a young reader can actually follow how the steam moves the wheels. It reads best slowly, a spread or two at a sitting, and works equally well as a bedtime story about a family trip and as a genuine introduction to how a steam engine functions, which is part of why reviewers singled out its technical clarity as much as its art. At sixty four pages it is one of the longer books on this list, closer in scope to an illustrated nonfiction account than a typical thirty two page picture book, and its free verse text is pitched a little older than a toddler read aloud, suiting children around five to nine who already have some patience for a long, detailed journey and want the mechanics of the engine explained rather than skipped past.