The follow up to The Silver Arrow. The Golden Swift is good, but not as enjoyable as the first book. The Golden Swift has some heavier subject material - lots of information on the consequences of reintroducing animal species to their native habitats. Children with magical talking steam trains are thrilled by their clever new plan to rescue endangered animals. It's been a year since Kate and Tom became conductors on the Great Secret Intercontinental Railway, and life has changed completely! Delivering animal passengers to their rightful habitats using their very own secret steam train, The Silver Arrow, is exciting and magical and fulfilling. There is an overwhelmingly clear Environmental message throughout the story (as with the first book) that is impactful, a little melancholy, but also full of hope. I think it really comes down to perspective. What you do with the information in this story is truly up to you and I think that's part of what makes the message so strong.

Some awkward diction and phrasing in some parts made this not as good of a read-aloud as the first book. Not much happens in either plot or character development and the whole thing left me feeling meh. A group of talking farm animals catches wind of the farm owner’s intention to burn the barn (with them in it) for insurance money and hatches a plan to flee.I liked that the author includes a lot of information about little-known animals in the world and often explains unique features about them as well as where they live in the world. In that respect, the book would offer a wonderful supplement to geography or zoological studies. Where I found the book less enjoyable was the conclusions drawn about climate change and the blame assigned to humans for what is assumed to be the catastrophic state of the world. I think climate and endangered species topics can be brought up without being so preachy and off-putting. And the preaching was not just from the characters but from anthropomorphized animals as well (as if they possessed higher intelligence than mere humans).

Four was that as hard as she worked on the Silver Arrow, as many animals as she helped, as hard as she tried, it was never, ever enough. There were always more animals in trouble. Kate read a lot, and in her experience stories with magic in them usually ended up with the world being saved at the end. But this was different. Kate tried and tried, and was brave, and never gave up, and generally acted like a hero, and still the world wasn’t saved. But it wasn’t one of those adventures that happens once and then you have to remember and savor and treasure it for the rest of your otherwise uneventful life. Since her birthday, Kate and Tom had gone on about a dozen trips on the Silver Arrow. At first she’d tried to keep a journal of them, but that had lasted about a trip and a half before she got lazy about it, and then some rabbits ate it, so that was that. She guessed she just wasn’t a journal-keeping person. But she’d helped hundreds of animals get where they needed to go, or get away from whatever they needed to get away from, or find whomever or whatever they were looking for. She’d ridden the Silver Arrow down deep tunnels, across luminous blue glacier crevasses, past secret vine-covered temples deep in sweltering equatorial rain forests. Complaint number one: Leading a double life was nowhere near as easy as it looked. Before all this happened she hadn’t even been that good at leading one life, and now that she had two they had a way of getting tangled up with each other. Problems from one life had a way of following you into the other one and vice versa. For example, Kate was always worrying about a social studies quiz when she should’ve been rescuing a sugar glider from a bushfire in Australia, and then in class when she was trying to remember the cause of the French Revolution (it was poverty), her brain would suddenly choose to worry about how chimney swifts were running out of chimneys to build their nests in.Four stars. This would be an excellent choice for public or school library acquisition, bedtime reading, or even buddy read. Kate was crouched in the cab of the Silver Arrow, sweating from the heat, her knees aching, as she scraped and shoved around inside its firebox with a ridiculously long-handled rake to try to get the fire going. It was hard work, and it wasn’t helping that the Silver Arrow was giving her a hard time while she did it. Plus she felt like she’d outgrown her old elementary school friends, and she somehow hadn’t managed to find any new friends to replace them with. She wondered sometimes if it wasn’t just a tiny bit the Silver Arrow’s fault—if spending so much time talking to a steam train and saving animals made it harder to relate to her classmates who led normal lives. It was everything she’d always been looking for without even knowing she was looking for it. Kate had always thought of herself as the kind of person who would one day lead a secret double life, and she’d figured her second life would probably be something in the superhero or espionage line, rather than the secret-invisible-train-conductor line. But she couldn’t have been happier with how things had turned out. Tell me, humans: What happens when you meet a wild animal in a field or a forest? What does that animal do?”

Grossman spins a tale that weaves environmental awareness and protection with fantasy. Middle grade readers will learn about a wide variety of species and see how interconnected we all are. Part of it was that she was at a new school, and she was still trying to figure out where she fit in. In elementary school she’d always been looking for her thing, her talent—something, anything, that she was good at, that would make her special. And she’d finally found it—boy, had she found it—but then the irony was that she couldn’t tell anybody about it! They meet another conductor, Jag, who works with the Golden Swift, a different train, who is not only moving animals around the world, as Kate is doing, but is also attempting to return certain creatures to their original habitats. Interestingly, Jag also goes to Kate's school, and made the school musical, so Kate’s a little annoyed with him.It’s some years after book one. Kate has been helping many animals and researching climates and animals under pressure from the effects of climate change. And, the author shows how restoring balance to the environment is complicated, and fraught with errors and danger. It's a disheartening thing for Kate and Jag to discover, but shows the book’s readers how restoring an environment is something that involves countless individuals and communities working together. And finally, complaint number five was that she couldn’t even go out on the Silver Arrow anymore because Uncle Herbert had disappeared! He was the one who gave Kate her missions. That was how things were done. But she hadn’t seen him for two months, and no one—not Tom, not their parents, not the Silver Arrow, not the porcupine who lived in the woods behind her house—had any idea what had happened to him. And this tree on which I am sitting," the condor said, "is a Great Basin bristlecone pine. Like most pine trees, they are both male and female, so we refer to them as they. They are about four thousand years old - they're not very precise about time. To put that number in perspective, this tree was a sapling around the time Stonehenge was being built. The ancient Egyptians were just inventing hieroglyphics. This tree witnessed the births of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and the reigns of all twenty-four kings of Israel and five hundred and fifty-nine emperors of China. They have outlived the Greek, Roman, British, Japanese, Abbasid, and Mongol empires." Complaint number two: Tom. Unbelievably, Tom had been showing signs of not being quite as interested in the Silver Arrow as he used to be. In fact he’d skipped the last couple of trips, which she found completely unacceptable on any number of levels. Kate would never dream of missing a chance to ride the Silver Arrow!