Cat Up a Tree

We found Cat Up a Tree at the library this week, and I like it so much I might buy a copy. Charlie and I have both enjoyed it very much.

At the beginning of the book, an old woman notices a cat stuck in the tree outside her window. Naturally, she calls the fire department to help. But they won't help. "Sorry, we do not catch cats up a tree anymore. Call back if that cat starts playing with matches."

By this time, there are five cats stuck in the tree, so the old woman tries calling the police station. They won't help either. More cats show up. She calls the zoo. They don't catch cats. And so on, and so on, and so on.

This is a fantastic book for a number of reasons. It teaches about different institutions and what services they provide. The old woman calls the fire department, the police, the pet store, the zoo, the post office, the library, and city hall. Each of them says they don't rescue cats up a tree, but mentions something about the job they actually do. Notably, most (but not all!) of these institutions are governmental. If it weren't for the inclusion of the pet store, one could make a nice little lesson about government services versus the free market here. Still, it does provide an opportunity to talk about all of these institutions that are set up for specific helpful purposes, but not for anything you might want them to do for you. And it's quite funny, too, particularly when city hall offers to put up a sign that says "Danger! Look up for Falling Cats."

The book also provides some fun counting practice, and in particular, counting by fives. It starts with one cat, then five, and then adds five more on each page, up to forty. This is quite a lot, compared to most counting books that only go up to ten or twelve. And since they're scattered all over the page, it's a challenge to keep track of which cats you've counted already.

So, what happens in the end? Are the poor cats stuck up the tree forever? Fortunately, no. The old woman gets so frustrated that she throws her phone out the window. But she doesn't unplug it from the wall first! The cats walk across the phone cord into her apartment, safe and sound. Good thing it wasn't a cell phone!

There's a nice little coda at the end, too. The old woman gets a call from city hall (presumably after reeling her phone back in to the house). There are mice everywhere, all over town! Can she help? "Sorry," she tells them. "The cats do not catch mice anymore. Call back if you wish to hear cats purr." I was so pleased that she didn't get altruistic in the end, but refused to help the people who had refused to help her. You might look at this as a sort of modern re-telling of The Little Red Hen, the classic fable in which nobody helps the hen with her planting and harvesting of wheat or baking of bread, so she refuses to share the bread with them in the end. This is a little different, because the old woman didn't actually do any work to rescue the cats herself, but just happened to rescue them by chance. Still, the principle is pretty similar.

We've had tons of fun with this book. It was a great find.

If You Made a Million

Charlie is way too young for this book. But I'm blogging about it now anyway, even though I haven't shown it to him, because it is such a great find. I am guessing that If You Made a Million is best for the 6-8 age range, but I don't have all that much experience with kids that age, so read the rest of this review and make your own judgment. (NOTE: At the time of this writing, there is something wrong with Amazon's "look inside" feature for this book, such that most of the illustrations are missing.)

This book explains money and various financial transactions in ways that are clear, straightforward, and highly accessible to kids. We work up to the title concept of a million dollars, but we start all the way at the beginning, with a penny.

"CONGRATULATIONS!" the first page announces. "YOU'VE EARNED A PENNY." A little girl is shown feeding a goldfish under a sign that says "Feed the Fish - Earn 1 cent." There's a photograph of a single penny, and the text explains, "It will buy anything that costs one cent." As an example, a boy has set up a stand where he's selling pebbles for one cent each.

When you turn the page, you've earned a nickel. (How, you ask? By dusting a duck, of course.) The book shows a photograph of a nickel and five pennies. It explains "ONE NICKEL is worth the same as FIVE PENNIES." We continue down the page and earn a dime, which we are clearly shown, in the same way, is the same as two nickels or ten pennies. Obvious. Straightforward. Clear. Countable. I particularly like that they mix up the fronts and backs of the coins.

Once we get to a dollar, the book starts to mix things up a bit. After explaining the various low-cost items we could buy with that dollar, the book makes a very different suggestion.

Or perhaps you'd like to save your dollar. You could put it in the bank, and a year from now it will be worth $1.05. The bank wants to use your money and it will pay you five cents to leave your dollar there for a year. The extra five cents is called interest. If you waited ten years, your dollar would earn sixty-four cents in interest just from sitting in the bank. Are you interested in earning lots of interest? Wait twenty years, and one dollar will grow to $2.70.

Dude.

Then we're back to explaining how much $5 is, and $10, and we do another interest calculation with putting $10 in the bank, and on up to $100, and then at long last we earn $1000. We'd like to buy a pet hippo with our $1000, but that's a huge wad of cash.

If you don't like the idea of carrying a thousand dollars around with you, you can put it in the bank and pay for the hippo with a check. The check tells your bank to give $1,000 to the person who sold you the hippo.

To illustrate how this works, the book presents a picture of a check written out for a thousand dollars.

Okay, that's a pretty good explanation. But wait, we're not done! There's a whole two-page explanation of how the process works in detail. You write the check and give it to the person who sold you the hippo, who gives it to his bank, who sends it to a clearinghouse, which tells your bank to take the money out of your account and the other person's bank to put the money into his account. Why did nobody give me this book when I was a kid?

All right. Now we've managed to earn $50,000 and we've decided to use it to buy a castle that's on sale for $100,000. But wait a minute. We don't have $100,000. We only have $50,000. What should we do? Get a mortgage, of course! Fully explained in clear detail.

Finally we earn a million dollars, and we have tons of saving and spending choices. What should we do? Well, the book tells us, it's really all about you and your personal values. What would you like to do? What would you like to have? Where would you like to go?

If you keep your million, you can probably live on the interest without doing any more work for the rest of your life. You might like that, or you could find it rather dull.

Making money means making choices.

So what would you do if you made a million?

Fantastic.

An Island Called Liberty

When an acquaintance pointed out a book that was described as "a cross between Dr. Seuss and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged," I knew I had to have a copy. Unfortunately, An Island Called Liberty is sorely disappointing.

The story is about an Island called (you guessed it) Liberty, which begins as a libertarian paradise. Then, one by one, the people think up great new ideas that can be implemented with government regulation. As the taxes and government workers add up, the economy tanks. It's very Road to Serfdom.

There are a lot of problems with this book, which I will go into in detail, but I think the fundamental problem underlying all the others is that it was not actually written for kids. I have no proof of this, but it strikes me as very likely. The text is a Dr. Seuss style poem about the economy-killing results of government regulation, but it doesn't explain anything on a level that children can understand. It reads much more like a poem that was written as a joke for grown-ups, as many Dr. Seuss parodies are. Add some illustrations, and bingo, instant kids' book! Or not.

At the most basic level, the poetry is awful. There are rhythm problems throughout, and some of the rhymes are pretty awful, too (e.g. "agency" in no way rhymes with "urgency"). The rhythm problems begin on page one, which begins:

There once was an island called Liberty,
Where people lived happy and free.
Life was not perfect, as any could see,
But the Islanders made it the best it could be.

As anyone should be able to recognize, the second line is two syllables short, with no obvious place to put pauses to make up the difference. The word "Liberty" in the first line also makes the rhythm awkward. The author didn't even have the sense to fix it up with easy filler words which, while still cheating, would have made it flow better. My own edit:

There once was an island they called Liberty,
Where all of the people lived happy and free.
Life was not perfect, as any could see,
But the Islanders made it the best it could be.

Simple, simple, simple. And so disappointing that the author didn't bother to fix these things. Such errors appear at least once on every page.

The illustrations are also amateurish. They're cute enough, but not really evocative or interesting. They don't add anything to the text. Reading the book, I felt that the illustrations were there mainly because children's picture books have to have illustrations, and for no other reason. Still, I have no particular fault with them.

If you manage to get through the clunky text, you'll find that the story does not do a very good job at explaining why all of the newly-enacted government regulations are bad. Near the end, we get a close look at the effect of taxes on one company, Bridget's Widgets & Wodgets, but this illustrates only the problems with the tax burden, not the problems of regulation in and of itself. (Additionally, I wish the character of Bridget had been introduced earlier in the story so the reader would identify more with her.) The regulations and government programs all sound like great ideas -- that's why the citizens of Liberty vote to adopt them -- but unless the reader is already in on why these sorts of things (welfare, medicare, standardized education, interstate highways, an "unsafe baby-toy ban") are inherently bad ideas, the reader is left with the impression that these things would be great if only they didn't cost so much money. That is (1) not true, and (2) nearly impossible for a child with a limited grasp of economics to understand. Concepts like personal responsibility, freedom of choice, and the importance of variety rather than standardization are almost completely absent in this book.

The publisher's comparison of this book to Ayn Rand is also off the mark. Certainly, the message of economic freedom is consistent with Rand's views on government. But that's where the similarity ends. There is no sense in the book of the moral values underlying capitalism and freedom that Rand stressed so strongly. While the text expresses disgust at rules limiting personal freedoms like smoking, flag-burning, and eating fattening foods, it does not talk about the importance of hard work and personal responsibility. It doesn't treat tax as an immoral theft, as Rand did, but instead as a purely economic burden that is fine when small but overwhelming when it gets too large. And though the text stresses the well-functioning private welfare system that operated before the government took it over, it doesn't explain the motivation for helping others in need. It just blithely recites that "caring for others fits our Islander goals," leading readers to think that the commonly-accepted virtues of altruism and charity are the primary motivation, rather than the enlightened self-interest that Rand would have identified.

The lack of philosophical underpinnings for the economic system create a depressing ending for the book as well. After the economic collapse caused by high taxes, the citizens have an epiphany. They thought the government regulation was helping, but it was actually hurting! They need to dismantle that structure and go back to a liberty-based society! Hooray! Except, then you turn to the last page and discover that after a while they forgot all this again and went back to massive regulation in an unending cycle. And they all lived unhappily ever after. The end.

Okay then. I guess there's still a market opportunity available for someone to write a good children's book about government regulation.

A Chair for My Mother

A Chair for My Mother is a wonderful story about the importance of work, savings, and family. I remember this book from when I was a child, and it was featured on Reading Rainbow, but judging by the number of Amazon reviews, it's not too widely known. If this is your first introduction to it, you are in for a real treat.

The book is narrated by a young girl who lives with her mother and grandmother. About a year ago, their house burned down. Everyone was safe (even the cat!), but all of their possessions were completely destroyed. The mother works as a waitress, so the family doesn't have very much money. They move into a new apartment, and their extended family and neighbors all pitch in to donate furniture and other necessary items. But there is not a big, comfy chair for them to relax in. So the mother brings home a huge glass jar from the restaurant, and they save up their coins until they have enough to buy the perfect chair.

The story is told somewhat out of order, beginning with working at the diner, moving through how they save up the coins, taking a flashback to tell the reader about the fire and moving into the new apartment, then culminating with filling up the jar, shopping for a new chair, and bringing it home to enjoy. This structure adds a lot of interest compared to the straightforward narrative arc of most picture books. It means the story is a bit more complex to follow, but I don't think Charlie had much trouble grasping that we were moving back and forward in time.

This is an incredibly useful book for introducing children to two major economic concepts: the importance of work for earning money, and saving and spending.

Work enters the book on page one. The opening line is about work ("My mother works as a  waitress in the Blue Tile Diner."), and by the end of the first paragraph, the little girl has a job, too. She visits her mother at the diner after school, and the owner pays her to do small tasks like refilling ketchup bottles. The girl clearly takes pride in her work and in her ability to earn money to spend herself and to contribute to her family's finances.

Work is fulfilling and necessary, but it's also exhausting. When mama comes home from work, "[s]ometimes she's so tired she falls asleep while I count the money out into piles." And making ends meet is not easy. When there are not many tips, mama "looks worried." Grandma apparently does not work, but she's responsible for the shopping in the family, and is always looking for "a good bargain on tomatoes or bananas or something she buys." Life is not all just candy and roses in this book. I really like the way the budgeting issues are presented. They are clearly there, but the book doesn't beat you over the head with them. This is a family that is not exactly struggling to make ends meet, but that has to stick to a pretty strict budget. They're not lacking for food or clothing or other necessities of life, but they've suffered a setback and they don't have much extra to go around. Nobody whines and cries over not being able to have the newest shiny toy, but working, earning money, and saving are central to this family's life.

The family has a clear savings plan for this concrete goal of buying a comfortable chair. The little girl always puts half of her earnings into the jar. Mama puts all the change from tips into the jar, presumably because her salary goes to providing necessities. And grandma puts the savings from her shopping trip into the jar as well. Charlie is too young yet to understand the value of money (he likes to use a shiny coin to buy pretend train tickets, but that's about it). For an older kid, this would be a great illustration of not only budgeting and saving, but also setting goals, making plans to achieve them, and  following through.

When the jar is full, nobody can quite believe it. They set out, first for the bank to change the coins into bills, and then out to the stores to shop for a chair. Having saved up for an entire year to buy this chair, they will not settle for anything but the best. They search and search until they find the perfect chair that they all love. The achievement of this goal is something to celebrate, so they take a picture of the three of them sitting together in the chair. Most importantly, they chose a goal that was truly a value to all of them. The last page of the book explains how the chair materially enhances their lives: "Now Grandma sits in it and talks with people going by in the daytime. Mama sits down and watches the news on TV when she comes home from her job. After supper, I sit with her and she can reach right up and turn out the light if I fall asleep in her lap." This is not a whim or a waste of money. This is a real value they have worked hard to add to their lives and will appreciate for a long time.

The portion of the book dealing with the fire and its aftermath is also rich with values. First, the family has its priorities straight: check to make sure that all the people are safe, and then the cat. There's no mourning for the lost physical possessions here, interestingly. Instead, there's a sadness that the rooms of their new apartment are empty. The book doesn't say so explicitly, but it seems to convey the idea that physical things are just things. They're replaceable. We might miss them, but generally we can get new ones. "[W]e're young and can start all over," as the grandmother puts it.

This family is struggling financially, though, and not able to buy everything new all at once. Fortunately, they live in a loving community made up not only of extended family, but also friendly and generous neighbors. When they move in to the new place, their friends and family bring everything from furniture to dishes to toys to curtains to pizza. This outpouring of benevolence is especially touching because it is unforced. The people in the community are reaching out because they care about their neighbors and are able to help.

The illustrations are rich with color, but in my opinion, somewhat simplistic. I was surprised to find that this is a Caldecott Honor Book, because the illustrations didn't really do much for me. I think the rich, complex, value-laden story is the true appeal of this book.

Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel

Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel is one of those books that's so famous it's even written about in other famous books. (Anyone remember Ramona Quimby asking her teacher, in Ramona the Pest, how Mike Mulligan took bathroom breaks?) Since everyone surely already knows this book, why am I writing about it? Because it has really excellent economic and ethical lessons that deserve attention.

Here's the basic recap: Mike Mulligan is a steam shovel operator who owns his own steam shovel, named Mary Anne. They have worked together for many years on big, important projects. But times have changed, and now all of the major projects in the cities are being done by gasoline, electric, and Diesel shovels, not the outdated steam shovels. Most steam shovels are being sold for scrap, but Mike can't face doing that to his beloved Mary Anne. Then one day Mike hears that the small town of Popperville is going to build a new city hall, so he and Mary Anne drive out there and offer to dig the cellar, promising that the work will be free if they can't complete it in a single day. One by one, the residents of Popperville turn out to watch, followed by the residents of other towns. All of the spectators motivate Mike and Mary Anne to work very fast, and they complete their job in just one day. But they've forgotten to leave a ramp to drive Mary Anne out of the cellar! After some discussion, everyone agrees to let Mary Anne stay in the cellar, where she will become the furnace for the new town hall, and Mike is hired as the janitor.

This book can be read as having an anti-development bias. It displays a certain amount of sadness for the technological changes that have made steam shovels obsolete. But there is plenty to counter this, unlike in, for instance, The Little House, another Virginia Lee Burton book with a very strong nostalgia for old-fashioned country living. The first few pages of Mike Mulligan are aglow with praise for technological and economic developments. Mike and Mary Anne are proud of their work digging canals, cutting paths for new roads and railroads, smoothing out landing fields for airplanes, and digging cellars for skyscrapers in the cities. The only technological development they seem to dislike is the one that puts them out of work--the invention of better digging technology.

Perhaps Mike's affection for Mary Anne led him to make some poor economic choices. He could have invested in a diesel shovel instead of taking "such good care of Mary Anne she never grew old." But it can also make good economic sense to keep your capital equipment in good working order as long as possible. This being a children's story book instead of a corporate balance sheet, we don't have the necessary information to decide whether Mike made the right choices or not. But this makes a great discussion topic as your kids get older. And little kids can relate in the right context, too: should we repair this toy or buy a new, upgraded model?

Mike and Mary Anne embody the value of productive work. They are extremely proud of all the work they have done on important development projects. When they are replaced by newer equipment and can no longer find work, "Mike Mulligan and Mary Anne were VERY SAD." (In all caps, no less!) There's nothing worse than being unemployed and useless. Their solution is not to give up, but to prove how useful they can be in the right context. They head out to the small town of Popperville, where it doesn't make economic sense to hire a big diesel shovel, but a steam shovel can still be very useful. They like other people to appreciate their work, too. When they know they are being useful and entertaining to spectators, they work even harder and faster.

The solution reached at the end of the book is pretty much perfect. Even if Mike hadn't forgotten to leave a ramp out of the cellar, turning Mary Anne into a furnace might well be the best economic solution out there. There can't be too many places like Popperville left for very long--economic development will continue to spread from big projects to small ones--and traveling between far-flung little towns with a day's work in each is not likely to be economically viable for Mike and Mary Anne. If Mary Anne can function efficiently as a heating unit, why not? It provides steady, useful work. Mike and Mary Anne are both thrilled with the situation; nobody treats it as a demotion (though perhaps it's a form of semi-retirement, sitting around with visitors telling stories and eating pie every day). Certainly it is much more productive than what other steam shovel operators did, scrapping their machines or leaving them to rust. Mary Anne goes on to have another whole phase of productive life because she was so well kept up by her operator. Mike gets to continue working with Mary Anne, clearly important to him, instead of having to give her up for a different machine. The solution is not only efficient, it also makes everyone happy.

Overall, I think the theme of this book is not nostalgia and anti-development. It's finding a productive niche for yourself given your capacities and limits. Not all of us can be CEOs of Fortune 500 corporations. Maybe we don't have the skills or capacity, or maybe we have other values, like family or leisure, that make other paths better for us. This book is about finding the work you can do, taking pride in it, and finding a situation that gives you the best life possible.

The Gruffalo

The Gruffalo (I've linked to the board book edition, which we own, but it's also available in paperback) is a cute little story about a mouse who keeps himself from being eaten by other animals in the forest, using his own cleverness. Whenever an animal wants to eat him, he scares them off by claiming that he's about to be joined by a scary monster called a gruffalo. This works great until the gruffalo turns out to be real, not imaginary, and also threatens to eat the mouse. But then the mouse parades back with the gruffalo to all the creatures he talked his way away from before. Each one looks at the gruffalo and runs away immediately. The gruffalo is convinced that they are actually afraid of the mouse, and runs away, leaving the mouse in peace. I'm almost certain that this is some kind of familiar folk tale, but I can't put my finger on what the original version was.

The book is written in very clever and nicely-flowing verse. So nice, in fact, that I'm going to reproduce the entire first animal encounter here so you can read it:

A mouse took a stroll through the deep dark wood.
A fox saw the mouse and the mouse looked good.
"Where are you going to, little brown mouse?
Come and have lunch in my underground house."
"It's terribly kind of you, Fox, but no--
I'm going to have lunch with a gruffalo.
"A gruffalo? What's a gruffalo?"
"A gruffalo! Why, didn't you know?"
"He has terrible tusks, and terrible claws,
And terrible teeth in his terrible jaws."
"Where are you meeting him?"
"Here, by these rocks,
And his favourite food is roasted fox."
"Roasted fox! I'm off!" Fox said.
"Goodbye, little mouse," and away he sped.
"Silly old Fox! Doesn't he know,
There's no such thing as a gruffalo?"

What I like most about this book is the subtlety and politeness of the text. The fox doesn't come in growling, "I'm going to eat you up!" and the mouse doesn't say, "No way, my friend the gruffalo is going to come and eat you up instead!" It's all very genteel and implied. Not only does this make for a more fun book, it also brings in more parent-child conversation about the book, if your kid is too young to make these connections on his or her own.

The illustrations are nothing particularly special. They're nice enough, and the gruffalo is drawn such that it is more silly than scary. There are a few details to find in the backgrounds--birds, butterflies, mushrooms, but nothing major is of note here.

One possible objection to this book is that the mouse gets himself out of his predicament through lying, a strategy we shouldn't glorify to our children. But it is morally proper to lie to protect your values, and your life, from criminals who would do you harm. So this really just becomes an opportunity to discuss the ethics of a difficult situation with your children. It's also quite a clever solution for the mouse to come up with, so we can respect him for his creativity and quick thinking.

The author, Julia Donaldson, is apparently quite well known in the U.K. for writing a large number of popular children's books. I haven't read any of the others, but I did want to point out that there's a direct sequel to The Gruffalo, called The Gruffalo's Child, which apparently involves the gruffalo telling his child about the very scary mouse he once met in the forest. I'm also kind of in awe of anyone who can get an entire professional website and Christmas TV special (sadly, not available for the U.S. market) made from just two books. That is some impressive marketing!

The Little Engine That Could

Charlie received The Little Engine That Could as a present from a relative about a month ago, and he fell in love with it immediately. He's definitely a train kid. But even for the non-train-obsessed out there, I'm sure you're familiar with this classic book. It was first written in 1930, and the story and pictures are almost sickeningly sweet at first glance. It strikes me, though, that the ethics behind this book are more complicated than I first thought. There are lots of good points and bad points here.

Let me recap the story first, in case it's not fresh in your mind. A train filled with dolls, toys, and fresh food is making its way over the mountain to the children who live in the town on the other side, when suddenly their engine breaks down. The dolls flag down passing engines and ask each one to help. The first three refuse, but the fourth engine, which is very small, agrees to help. This little blue engine has never been over the mountain before and is not sure she can make it, but with will power and determination, pulls the train over the mountain to a happy ending.

I'd like to briefly mention and then put aside the economic issues, because they are disappointing but not all that important. Stuck in a bad situation, the dolls do not try to hire a new engine or trade value-for-value, but instead start begging passers-by for help. Even if they don't have any cash, they surely have things they can trade: toys, food, empty space in the train cars after the goods are delivered on the other side of the mountain, fuel from their broken engine. It's also unclear how the toys and food are going to get into the hands of the "good little boys and girls" on the other side of the mountain. Will they be sold in a shop, or given out for free? Or are these items already owned by the boys and girls, and don't want their late-night partying on the other side of the mountain to be discovered? These questions are not addressed; it's just imperative that they get there by morning.

Why do I say that these economic issues are not very important? Because they're not a major focus of the book. You'd have to come up with the idea yourself to ask about it, and Charlie is way too young to do that. The book doesn't claim that begging is the best thing to do in the situation, and there's no discussion about alternatives; it's just what the dolls do. The focus is on other moral issues, which I discuss below: solving problems, helping others when you can, and the importance of a positive attitude and determination. Just because the setup for these issues is questionable doesn't mean that the book as a whole is a waste of time.

I'd be remiss if I didn't also mention the slightly sexist aspect to the book, which is not surprising since it was written 80 years ago.  The main character taking responsibility for getting the train across the mountain is a toy clown, who is male. The two female dolls fret in the background and then start to cry. Though to be fair, a toy elephant cries, too.

Now on to the good stuff.

Solving your own problems: I see this as a very free-range-friendly book. The child-readers identify with the dolls and the little clown who were on the train and are now trying to convince another engine to pull them over the mountain. There are many parental figures who might have shown up -- the engineer, the manufacturer of the toys, the shopkeepers waiting to receive the merchandise, the parents of the children across the mountain -- but none of them are ever mentioned. The dolls are in a bind, and they use their own intelligence and resources to find help. (Another free-range note is the inclusion of a jackknife as one of the toys on the train.)

Helping others -- or not: The second or third time we read this book, right when Charlie was beginning to engage with the story, he scolded the first engine that refused to help. "No, choo-choo train! That is not okay!" He was very adamant, shaking his finger at the book and frowning. This provided possibly the first occasion for me to verbally explain rationally selfish ethics to him. It is okay for the engine to refuse help, but it's not very nice. We probably don't want to be friends with him. The author and most readers would probably characterize the non-helpers as morally bad, but there is nothing in the text or pictures that demands this interpretation. There's also a great opportunity to differentiate between the first two engines, who are just snooty and mean, and the third engine, who is old and tired and might suffer actual pain if he helped.

The fourth engine agrees to help because she is friendly and nice. She doesn't have to, nobody forces her to, but she decides of her own free will that she will take on what is for her a very difficult task in order to help others. She has nothing to lose, and she has a sense of benevolence and of adventure that are inspiring.

Positive attitude: This last message is what the book is known for. The little blue engine has never even been over the mountain, let alone pulling a train behind her. She's very small and is not sure she can make it. But she gives it her best try anyway, and the positive attitude ("I think I can. I think I can. I think I can.") helps her succeed in the end. Woohoo!

Overall, this is a recommend. It's not perfect, but it has a number of very good elements and teaching opportunities. The text and pictures are a bit boring to an adult, but the book is a childhood classic and Charlie absolutely loves it.