This April I read the book The Golden Swift by Lev Grossman. This book is the second book to the series The Silver Arrow and is a fiction book. The Golden Swift is about how Kate and her brother Tom are now both conductors of a Magical Railway but Kate is now getting bored and tired of not being able to share her cool hobby to other kids. One day, when Kate and her mother were looking for her uncle Herbert, she finds out that he’s missing. This is when Kate goes on her own to look for her uncle with the help of a bird, wolverine, and her brother Tom.
I appreciated this book because of the plot and story. Usually in series, where there are only two books, the second book isn’t very good. This wasn’t the case for The Golden Swift. The author did a great job still incorporating the magic and the animals from the second book but also added new characters like a new train, and conductors. Also, furthermore I loved how the author at the end still wrote about the animals from the first train which Kate and Tom conducting in the first book.
My favorite character in the book was the Cassowary. This is because when Kate and Tom were looking for a train to ride on to find their uncle, the Cassowary helped them. Also, the Cassowary was the world’s most dangerous bird and was able to pin down a wild wolverine who trashed Kate and Toms uncles house. A quote to prove this is “it was like he’d hit a wall: He reverse course in midair and flew backward up the stairs. The cassowary climbed up on him.”
My favorite quote from the story is “In France there’s a place called the Red zone, where some of the worst battles of World War One were fought. A hundred years later the ground is still so full of poison gas and unexplored bombs and grenades that no people can live there. But animals do. This quote shows that animals can find any place to live in and they want to live here because there are no humans to hunt them down or kick them out. I liked this quote because I never thought of it that way. Usually when there are pigeons or insects I kill them or shoo them off. I never thought that they just want a place to live in just like how we live here on Earth.