This March I read the book The Silver Arrow by Lev Grossman. The Silver Arrow is a fiction book about how 11 year old Kate gets a huge surprise for her birthday. For her 11th birthday Kate sends a letter to her uncle asking for a present. The next day a train arrives and Kate is ecstatic. Her mother and father do not feel the same way and tell Kate’s uncle to keep it. Kate is miserable and when everyone was asleep at night she went out to her train with her little brother Tom and they both went inside the train. What they didn’t know was that the train was actually a magic train called the silver arrow and they were now going to be conductors for talking animals and sending them to where they need to go.
I liked this book because the main character Kate was so ordinary and then something magical happened to her. This made me feel like that could have happened to anyone and it could happened to me. Also, I liked this book because of the type of magic they used in the book. Usually when you think of magic you would think of powers or magic spells but in this book it was a magic train and talking animals which I liked.
Tom was my favorite character because he always knew what to do when the train was in trouble and Kate didn’t know what to do Tom would always have an answer and lead them to victory. Also, I liked how Tom was fun. In the train they could ask for certain types of cars and Tom wanted a candy car which would be really cool and a pool car. Both of these cars are amazing and cool to be in. A quote to show this is “Why don’t we get a candy car too, Oh! And how about a pool car too! That would be fun!”
My favorite quote from the story is “Don’t feel too bad about what humans have done,” the mamba said with a gentleness in his voice that she’d never quite heard before. “Feeling guilty doesn’t help anything anyway. Humans are animals doing what all animals do: surviving. It’s just that you’ve done it too well, so well that now you have to become a new kind of animal, one who makes sure that all the others survive, too.” I liked this quote because it touched my heart. I realized humans have been treating animals very poorly, destroying all of their homes and forcing animals to find new habitats that are smaller and more dangerous.