by Moe Zilla

Created on: October 02, 2010

"The terrifying event that inspired 'Shortcut' actually happened, " explains the book's jacket, adding that it also began the author's lifelong fascination with trains. Eventually Donald Crews wrote and illustrated a Caldecott Honor-winning children's picture book called "Freight Train," and they seem to hold a special fascination for him.  Even in "Shortcut," there's a pair of rails in nearly every picture. The story opens with a group of seven children looking for a shortcut home, and they decide to follow the railroad tracks.

"We should have taken the road. But it was late, and it was getting dark, so we started down the track..."

Crews draws the wild forest around them with a broad sweep of green watercolor. And he draws the children balancing themselves on the rails, as they seem to dawdle oblivious to any possible danger. The narration notes that the freight trains don't run on a fixed schedule, and might hurtle down the tracks at any time.  "We should have taken the road," its adds ominously, but instead the children laugh and shout and sing and throw stones.

"We passed the cut-off that led back to the road..."

Suddenly, there's a "WHOO-WHOO" drawn into the distance of the picture. "I HEAR A TRAIN!" shouts one of the children, as the others stop and listen. Suddenly they start running, and the frightened children jump off the tracks onto the steep slope next to it. And there's one glorious two-page illustration of the black engine's silhouette, in the darkening night, without a single word of narration.

"Klakity-Klak-Klak-Klakity..." reads the words drawn into the next picture - another two-page drawing of the enormous boxcars and oil cars that rattle along the tracks. Turn the page, and there's more cars - a hopper car, a car filled with logs, and then a caboose. Only the words "Klakity-Klak-Klak" appear on every page, as though everything has stopped to let the train rumble through. The words even fill the book's inside front cover, suggesting the way the noisy train will ultimately startle the children.

That's really all the happens in the story, but I like how it remained faithful to the child's point of view. The train scares them, and presumably reinforces their guilt for trying to take a dangerous route home. "We didn't talk about what had happened for a very long time," the narrator reports on the book's final page.

"And we didn't take the short-cut again."

Learn more about this author, Moe Zilla.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.