In the first train adventure Kate and her young brother Tom meet all sorts of endangered animals and along the way they learn about the main threats - habitat loss, human behaviour, hunting, global warming and more. In this second instalment Kate once again boards the Silver Arrow but this time she makes discoveries about the ways people are trying to reintroduce species to their old homelands - places where they have not been seen for decades or even centuries.
Publisher blurb: 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. Until one day a new and mysterious train almost rams them off the track! Its name? The Golden Swift. Kate catches a glimpse of the conductors. They're children, like them, and they're dropping animals off at all the wrong stations! Kate is determined to catch up with their rivals and confront them. Her actions will lead to an adventure bigger than she could have dreamed of, racing through the highlands of Western Scotland, trekking in the Australian outback and diving down deep into the Bering Sea on a magical submarine. Kate will have to discover a whole new way to offer endangered animals safe and lasting homes … Read a story extract here.
The blurb makes all of this sound very straightforward but interfering with nature is not an easy solution. On the surface this seems like a good idea to reintroduce species for example beavers to England, but in reality every action has a reaction. Lynx are taken back to Scotland but when the lynx kill some sheep the farmers begin to shoot them. Some of the relocations are successful but in the end Kate and her new friend Jag decide to retrieve all of the animals they previously moved to a new location.
Read more plot details in this review from Reading Time.
The snarky banter of the talking locomotive is an understated delight ... Kirkus
Here is the alternate cover:
I do wish this book had back notes. I really wanted to know more about so many of the animals that were mentioned: cassowary, wolverine, kodkod, matamata, Przewalski's horse,Darwin's rhea, red-tailed phascogale, western Javan ebony langur, and the American burying beetle.
The Golden Swift is the second book in this series by Lev Grossman. I did enjoy the first book - The Silver Arrow. This second book was an interesting story but it didn't hold my attention in the same way as the first. The reason for the journey to find and rescue Uncle Herbert felt a little contrived and I was unconvinced when he explained why he had been missing. But mostly I just wanted to know more about each of the relocated animals and more about the real world success or failures of these schemes.
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