Starred Review. Niemann (The Pet Dragon) navigates New York"s subterranean system in this playful love letter to public transportation. Readers follow two children and their father, pictured as transit map–style stick figures, who spend a rainy day exploring routes. \"Riding the A requires some patience/ if you plan to visit all forty-four stations,\" they advise. The trains occasionally acquire some light personification (\"The 7 is on his way to meet... / his friends at Times Square, 42nd Street!\") after the F and G lines separate at Bergen Street, \"The G says, "Don"t cry. I will meet you/ again at Roosevelt Avenue!\"). The tone is largely celebratory-- rate hikes and construction don"t come up--but Niemann finds pleasure in unexpected places, too (\"There are plenty of critters on the tracks of the J/ enjoying the subway all night and all day\"). His folksy gouaches are color-coded to match the various subway lines, and his pitchblack backdrops make the colors explode, while alluding to tunnel interiors. An abundance of droll details will delight regular straphangers and stir the imaginations of transportation-obsessed children.


From School Library Journal
PreSchool-Grade 1—This colorful, vivacious, child-centered title began with a post on Niemann"s blog, Abstract City, in which he describes a day of riding the subway with his two sons just for fun. The artist uses thick gouache paint to render his characters as standard pictograms, akin to those on city signs, with curved edges for hands and feet, and the technique creates a chalky texture that looks like correction fluid. Visual communication lords over the text. Niemann uses many tropes for expression: the youngsters, excited to spend the rainy day on the subway, hi-five. The agony of the adventure coming to an end is punctuated with tears bursting from one son and father dragging the other one, boneless. The spreads of the dedication page, the A train and all its 44 stops, and the wild crisscrossing array of colored lines under Times Square mirroring the famed city lights on the surface, capture the glory of this venerable transportation system. The rhyming text and references to subway lore add chuckles for older readers, but the meter does create an occasional stumble. A sure hit with most youngsters, especially those who are transfixed by trains.