Discover the magical, timeless, bestselling children's adventure series from Lev Grossman, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Magicians

But, she is intrigued by his side quests, as she’s been wanting to do more, and decides to also do what Jag has been doing on the sly. Like The Silver Arrow, The Golden Swift teaches young readers about different types of animals, geography, the impact humans have had on the environment, and climate change. I feel like The Golden Swift is easier to follow along with than The Silver Arrow, but you still need to read The Silver Arrow first to have the context for everything that is going on--especially when you reach the penultimate part of The Golden Swift.Like with the first book, I also listened to this one mostly via audiobook and enjoyed the narration. I would recommend having the physical or e-copy on hand as there are illustrations, though. Four stars. This would be an excellent choice for public or school library acquisition, bedtime reading, or even buddy read. 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. 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. Kate had only just met her uncle for the first time last year, and on the whole it had been a pretty good year since then. On her eleventh birthday, which had ended up lasting for several weeks, Herbert—who was in fact a billionaire—and also it turned out a wizard—had given Kate a steam train called the Silver Arrow. The Silver Arrow was a magic train that had a candy car, and a library car, and an unbelievably cozy sleeper car. It was part of a vast invisible worldwide train service dedicated to helping animals in need, which there seemed to be more and more of lately.

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! Whereas The Silver Arrow focuses on shuttling animals to safer locales, The Golden Swift is more focused on trying to find the right balance for the earth. Just like The Silver Arrow, The Golden Swift does tend to get a bit heavy-handed when discussing humans' impact on the earth, animals, and climate change.My favorite character in the books remains the Silver Arrow itself. Its printouts add levity and humor to the story. Oh, and the animals could talk. And the Silver Arrow could talk, too. This whole story was so flagrantly implausible that Kate had already resigned herself to never telling it to anybody; she guessed she could file it away with all those great speeches she made in her head that nobody would ever hear. At the end of their first trip, Kate and her younger brother, Tom, were made official conductors of the Great Secret Intercontinental Railway. 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. Instead, we go deeper into environmental and conservation questions. This does mean some of the adventure is left behind and while there are some good parts - the submarine being most notable - it does seem to take a side step from the growth of Kate (who grows a lot here and is clearly the main character, whereas in the first book she and Tom shared the stage more) and the more serious and complex questions of conservation and environmentalism and humans' place in the world.

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. Well, okay,” Tom said. “But I’m sure their trampoline isn’t bad. Trampolines are innocent. They know nothing of good and evil.”I read The Silver Arrow. Then I read the first 2 books of The Magicians trilogy (very different). Now I've read the Golden Swift. Tom wasn’t helping, either. He was standing on one foot on the engine’s giant boiler, practicing his balance. It was a hapkido thing. The newer animal companions weren’t nearly as endearing to me as the ones from the first book (especially The Fishing Cat!), though the wolverine has his moments. I liked Jag as a new character, but wished he had been developed even further. The scene with him and Kate fixing up his project was one of my favorites, though. I liked the idea of the Barracuda and would have loved to see it featured more than it was. I hope there will be at least one more book to finish this series off. That had nothing to do with the Silver Arrow, but she was still annoyed about it, so she put it on the list. I didn’t like this one quite as much as the first but I still enjoyed seeing Kate and Tom again. This one takes on a more serious tone while the first book focuses more on the magical aspects. The more mature conversations about animal endangerment and conservation are important, though. I liked how the author showed how complex these issues can be to solve. There’s a part involving a former animal character that brought tears to my eyes.

Goldman's premise is an interesting one with excitement and creative problem solving and definite maturing of the characters. I just wish readers were not also fed a particular notion of science and politics at the same time. It can't be that simple," she said. "I mean, can you really just go . . . messing around with nature like that?" 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. 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. Though this was a little darker than its predecessor (and that book had plenty of sad moments) it's still got a hopeful , happy ending.