Urban kids will relate to the lively pace of this subway ride told in verse. A glossary at the end tells about subways in ten cities around the world. The glossary feels as if it is intended for an older audience, but that said, this is a book young kids will relate to as they see the typical sights underground.

"We step on quickly.
Move aside.
Doors slide shut.
Our turn to ride."

Growing up on Long Island, my parents weren't keen on taking us into New York City. My early visits to Manhattan were always aboard school buses for field trips to museums and plays. And so it wasn't until my first high school outings -- when we'd be set free after a couple of hours to roam about the City on our own -- that I'd come to experience the subway.

"We bump and sway.
We hold on tight.
We zip thorough tunnels
dark as night."

By then, I'd spent years imagining what it was like to be racing about underground. My early impressions of the bustling New York subway crowds were gleaned in the spring of 1964, when I was the new kid in Commack listening to my third grade teacher reading aloud from the Newbery Honor book, The Cricket in Times Square.

"Get off my train!"
-- Vincent Schiavelli, from the movie Ghost, as the spirit on a NYC subway train in the freakiest subway scenes I've ever seen.

When, as a teen, I began attending rock concerts and antiwar protests in Manhattan, we'd ditch the car at Rego Park in Queens and take the subway. There is so much added magic when you suddenly go from speeding along in the dark underground to taking a crowded escalator upward to emerge into the bright lights, wonderful scents, and utter chaos of the greatest city in the world. (Oh, man! Just the thought of it has now got me craving a real salt bagel.)

"Saxophone blasts
jazzy vibes.
Drums and cymbals
jam and jive."

I've spent the second half of my life living outside of the other greatest city in the world -- San Francisco. Here the subway is called BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit). When I want to go play in the City while avoiding bridge tolls and traffic jams, I can cruise over to El Cerrito and ditch my pickup truck in favor of careening under the Bay into the midst of Market Street. And on those occasions when I am heading out of town, I'm able to travel on BART right to one of the airports.

"Clomping, stomping,
shuffling feet
step to the clacking
subway beat."

Thanks to my attendance at American Library Association conventions and Book Expos, I have gotten to experience a great variety of subway systems. I love those cool old cars on the T up in Boston; I've seen the hypnotic advertising in the dark tunnels of Atlanta's MARTA system; I've taken many trips from my favorite hotel in Chicago up north to little jazz clubs; and I've been all over D.C. thanks to The Metro.

"Last stop! we hear
the driver shout.
Doors open wide.
We step out."

My eyes just drink up Sue Rama's bright watercolor collages that illustrate Heather Lynn Miller's lyrical Subway Ride. Five smiling kids groove to the beat of the subway as they experience the systems in Atlanta, Cairo, Chicago, London, Mexico City, Moscow, New York City, Stockholm, Tokyo, and Washington, D.C. An afterward provides a brief introduction to each of these subway systems. (Those readers who then want to know more about the history of subways can check out Subway: The Story of Tunnels, Tubes, and Tracks by Larry Dane Brimner and Neil Waldman.)

Riding the subway is really exciting and, like other public transit, benefits the environment. This Subway Ride is a total blast.

Take a ride on subway trains all around the world. Beginning in Cairo, a multicultural group of children rides the trains in ten cities, zigzagging from stop to stop around the globe. The brief text is in serviceable near-verse ("Rumbling, roaring— / blurring speed. / Silver bullet. / Rushing breeze"), but barely registers against Rama's vibrant digital collages of watercolor art. Vivid colors and blurred lines evoke a bustling cheer. Cleverly composed to suggest both depth and action, the pictures tell most of the story: Atlanta's dark tunnels, Chicago's El (a slight deviation from the underground theme), jazz combos in the Stockholm stations and so on, an iconic ticket indicating from place to place where readers and riders are. The book ends with crisp thumbnail portraits of the subways in the cities, which also include London, Mexico City, Moscow, New York, Tokyo and Washington, D.C. The offbeat idea is deftly handled and should trigger further study.

A couple months ago I received an advance copy of Subway Ride, written by Heather Lynn Miller, in the mail from Charlesbridge Publishers [sic]. It’s a new title from the Massachusetts-based publisher this year. As I flipped through the book, I was impressed with the colorful illustrates, by Sue Rama, which accurately depict subway stations around the world. However, after reading the book a few times, I realized this text could be used in a Writing Workshop to teach younger students about varying sentence lengths in their writing.

Miller wrote the text with a variety of sentence structures. There are some sentence fragments and simple sentences. There are also some longer sentences, which include prepositional phrases, in the text. I can envision using this book in a primary grade classroom with children who need to break out of the simple sentence structure rhythm, which little kids often get accustom to using.

This book might be best-suited for a strategy lesson, in which you group children of the same writing ability, for students who need assistance using a variety of sentence lengths. You can think aloud about what Miller did, as a writer. For instance, for a slightly longer sentence, such as, “Subway whizzes down the track,” I might say: I notice that the author wants me to make a picture in my mind about where the train is going. She doesn’t just say that the subway whizzes, or passes, by. Instead, she tells me that the subway is whizzing, or heading, down the track, which helps me picture how and where the train is moving. However, for fragments like “Rushing breeze,” I might say: I think the author used an incomplete thought here in order to make me, the reader, stop and think about how the breeze was moving. I can feel the train zooming by me, causing the air to turn to wind, rushing by my face. By writing just a couple of words, and then putting a period at the end of them, I think the author wants me to stop and think about what that would feel like.

Five children head underground where they pay their fares, pass through the gate, and are off on a subway ride. Describing the journey the rhymed text reads, "We bump and sway. We hold on tight. We zip through tunnels dark as night. Clomping, stomping, shuffling feet step to the clacking subway beat."

At the end of the line the children hop out of the subway car and head for the steps back above ground where a fun day at the park awaits them.

The author also provides some brief information on the subway systems in ten cities, including Atlanta, Chicago, London, Moscow, Washington, D.C., and New York City.

Sue Rama's vibrant water color illustrations capture the action of this children's subway adventure. Appropriate for youngsters between the ages of four and seven, this would be an excellent introduction to subway travel.

If you have a very young child whom you think might be a little nervous about venturing onto a subway, try reading this book aloud a few times before taking him on his first subway adventure.

Subway Ride is written by Heather Lynn Miller and illustrated by Sue Rama. It is an excellent concept book about a fast way to move people around cities---subways. It features a glimpse of ten of the world’s great subways from New York City to Japan. The story focuses on a multicultural group of five children, two boys and three girls. They magically gather together in a subway station to begin their journey.

They board the first train to Cairo----Africa’s only subway. The next subway stop is Moscow where paintings decorate the stations. This continuous ride goes on to Stockholm where the children dance to the music of musicians in the tunnel banana. Next they hop on the trusty London tube---the very first subway in the world. Their trip includes riding the New York City subway, the Washington subway, the Chicago L with its elevated tracks and the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority.

All the while the kids interact with the busy feet, music, and pace of each culture. The beautiful mural- filled walls of Mexico’s subway stations precede their final Tokyo destination. Here the children disembark to play with kites in the sunshine.

The illustrations by Sue Rama are digitally enhanced and colorfully designed. Splashes of blues, yellows, gold and purples entertain the eye of the young reader. The watercolors capture the energy, excitement and wonder of world travel. The children wave, smile, jump on and off trains and seem to completely enjoy life. Quoting from the book’s rhymed text, ”We bump and sway. We hold on tight. We zip through tunnels dark as night.” There is a description of each subway at the back of the book featuring fun facts. For instance, the research sites the New York subway as having 468 stations. This is the greatest number of stations in any system in the world.

Five enthusiastic children of various ethnicities travel subway systems in different regions of the world. After paying their fares and scrambling through the turnstiles, they step on and off the rail cars and become part of the hustle and bustle of their changing underground locations, which include Cairo, Moscow, London, New York City, Washington DC, and Tokyo. The concise text, written in flowing rhymes, moves quickly. Ramá’s colorful digital collage spreads are a perfect match for Miller’s word images. The artistic style has an Ezra Jack Keats quality as it brightly chronicles the children’s travels. Native language spellings along with English spellings of the destinations are written on the subway tickets found within the artwork. This picture book can be incorporated into preschool/primary units on transportation, used as a springboard to introducing parts of the world, or shared during storytime. For a subway theme, pair it with Anastasia Suen’s Subway (Viking, 2004) and Mary Quattlebaum’s Underground Train(Doubleday, 1997). With its global perspective, it’s a worthy purchase.

Not every child lives in a city with a subway system. Those who do will appreciate this lively re-creation of the train-riding experience, while those who don’t will get a feel for what it’s like to ride underground. Using brisk rhymes and digitally enhanced watercolors that shimmer and shake, the book follows five children as they make their way through subway stations around the world. Small metro tickets identify the city in each spread, but sometimes so do the particulars of the scene: hieroglyphics on the walls in Cairo; the Underground symbol in London; the outside El in Chicago. Whatever the location, the generalities are the same; waiting, rushing, buskers, rumbles, and roars. Smartly conceived, terrifically executed, this is a perfect book to have on hand when the subject is trains. An afterword goes into more detail about the subways in the featured cities.

Want to make a pre-schooler smile? Just pull out a book about things that go!

Subway Ride uses jaunty rhyme to explore the underground transportation in 10 major cities, from Atlanta to Tokyo. Each city is identified by a subway ticket in the collage-style watercolor illustrations. The same five children romp from page to page, blending all 10 cities into a single happy experience. They dash down stairs, turn turnstiles, enjoy jazzy underground musicians, and of course zoom through tunnels--even, at one point, ride high on the Chicago El.

The rhythmic text and energetic art will delight city kids who have ridden the subway all their lives and small-town or country children who have never seen a subway. The back of the book includes quick facts highlighting unusual features of the underground in each of the 10 cities.

Five children - boys and girls of different ethnicities - pay their subway fares and go on a thrilling ride on the train together. The subway systems of Atlanta, Cairo, Chicago, London, Mexico City, Moscow, New York City, Stockholm, Tokyo, and Washington, D.C., are depicted here in gorgeous color and vivid detail.

These well-chosen subway systems - four from the US, one from Mexico, two from Asia, two from Europe and one from Africa - provide great exposure to the trains of the world to readers. The story by Heather Lynne Miller is set to simple, rhyming verse and depicts the thrill of a subway ride. The artwork by Sue Ramá is vibrant, sophisticated and imaginative, and is more engaging than the text.

An appendix to the story provides some history to the subway systems depicted in the book. This book is perfect for classrooms and school libraries, as well as for children who love trains.

Miller's spare rhyming text conveys impressions of subway travel: "Clomping, stomping, / shuffling feet / step to the clacking / subway beat." Rama's merrily busy digital collages of watercolor art capture the sensations of riding on mass-transit trains. Endnotes give brief information about subway systems in different cities around the world.

"Once again, thank you for spending your Saturday with the Northwest Indiana Reading Council and our Young Author Conference. You are truly an inspiration for our students. I still have students talking about the conference, writing more, and sharing, not only your books, but their books too. I hope you enjoyed your day as much as the students."

"We had so many enthusiastic comments about your presentation as the keynote speaker! You dazzled the crowd, and they loved hearing about your book. Thank you again for speaking."