eBook Review: All Aboard the Dinotrain!

Title: All Aboard the Dinotrain

Author: Deb Lund

Illustrator: Howard Fine

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Provider: TumbleBooks

Age: K-3

OMG!  DINOSAURS AND TRAINS!

We don't really need a review for this one, obviously,  because of the following equation:

dinosaurs + trains = awesome

(We'll do a review anyway cuz that's how we roll)

Deb Lund and Howard Fine do a decent enough job of this only slightly awkwardly rhyming romp through a land where dinosaurs ride on top of trains and end up being tossed into a gorge without anyone being hurt.  Herbivores and carnivores co-exist peacefully, one of the brontosaurs has a beehive hairdo,  and "dino" exists as a prefix that can be added to any lexical category.  Kirkus called this book a "hilarious new brouhaha" while PW states that it's "dino-mite."  It translates well into an eBook, too, what with all the "roller coaster dinoride" action.  The animation is a bit choppy at times, but that may have been done purposely to kick things up a notch when the train barrels down a hill and magically flies across a collapsed trestle.  There's a "we think we can!" nod to Watty Piper's The Little Engine That Could , but All Aboard the Dinotrain won't be a classic.

An interesting note in Tumblebooks- if you pause the eBook, some of the animation remains- in this case, smoke from the smokestack kept billowing as Little J and I readjusted ourselves on the couch.  We used the Kindle Fire for this one, and it didn't display well.  The Tumblebooks dashboard takes up too much space and I couldn't get rid of the address bar or the tabs in the browser.