Thomas & Friends: Go, Train, Go! (Thomas & Friends)

My little two year old boy LOVES Thomas. He has a blast with this book, pulling all of the tags and seeing what happens next. Plus, it is a "short and sweet" read and the story is nice. His favorite book.

My 2 yrs + 2 month old grandson loves this Thomas book! (his other favorite is Crack in the Track). He now "reads" it to us and has pretty much the entire book memorized. We love to hear his little voice saying "faster than fast he goes" - He also has decided that the "Judge" is "Ga-Ga" (me) and inserts that instead of "Judge" in the reading. He related the logs in this book very early to trees and cut firewood logs he sees in the real world. At 18 months he would point at a pile of cut logs and say "Logs like Thomas!" The rhymes are corny, but kids love them!

Any Thomas fan will enjoy this story. It is a favorite with the children I work with.

My daugher (18 months) loves this book. She even refers to it as the "go" book. I like to read it by mimicking the speed of the text. I slow down when it says "slow slow slow" and I read it fast when the train is moving fast. From an adult's perspective, I would have preferred it to be written better, but it's fine for a child. However, I don't think it necessarily teaches bad grammar. Now that I know this is the abridged version, I'll have to look for the full version. That probably explains why the story seems incomplete (especially at the end).

The board book is pretty sturdy, so it should withstand plenty of readings. The illustrations are surprisingly detailed for their style. The text flows nicely; it has a good rhythm. There are a lot of things to talk about here: a hat that flies off, a cow who moos at Thomas as Thomas peeps back, and a dog beside the tracks. The fact that the whole story is about Thomas taking a judge to a train show means that a great variety of engines appear at the end, and Harvey shows up on an earlier page. If you are bothered by the use of "slow" (as opposed to "slowly") as an adverb, you might want to skip this one. Thomas "goes slow" repeatedly. Additional note: I didn't realize that the board book was an abridged version of Go, Train, Go! until my son got the full version for Christmas. The two books have very different rhythms, and the full version has quite a few more pages. There's even a goat in the longer book, but there's no goat in the board book. Initially, I liked the rhythm of the board book better, but the other version is growing on me.