The Silver Arrow

★ ★ ★ 1/2 (rounded up)
This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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You really don't appreciate how incredibly colossal a steam locomotive is till one shows up parked on the street in front of your house. This one was about fifteen feet high and fifty feet long, and it had a headlight and a smokestack and a bell and a whole lot of pipes and pistons and rods and valve handles on it. The wheels alone were twice her height.

THE SILVER ARROW

The Silver Arrow

Life always seemed so interesting in books, but then when you had to actually live it nothing all that interesting ever seemed to happen. And unlike in books, you couldn't skip ahead past the boring parts.

The Chronicles of Narnia

Narnia

The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles

The Phantom Tollbooth

Tollbooth

Narnia

Deep in her heart Kate knew that. She knew that her problems weren't real problems, at least not compared with the kinds of problems kids had in stories. She wasn't being beaten, or starved, or forbidden to go to a royal ball, or sent into the woods by an evil stepparent to get eaten by wolves. She wasn't even an orphan! Weirdly, Kate sometimes caught herself actually wishing she had a problem like that-a zombie apocalypse, or an ancient curse, or an alien invasion, anything really-so that she could be a hero and survive and triumph against all the odds and save everybody.

The Phantom Tollbooth

The Silver Arrow

THE SILVER ARROW

She'd almost forgotten that the train could talk. There's a lot going on in your life when you have more urgent things to think about than a talking train.