The railway children [sound recording] by Edith Nesbit.

    Review by:  Chris

Title:   The railway children [sound recording]

Author:  Edith Nesbit

Collection:  Juvenile Audiobooks

I read this book for a Victorian Children’s Literature course as an undergrad, and I was really charmed by it. The story focuses on the adventures of three children from London who move to the country when their father is arrested and accused of treason, though the children do not know anything about this for most of the novel. The three get into several scrapes, but they also end up helping many people and performing good deeds without intentionally setting out to do so. As a result, they endear themselves to everyone they meet, including readers like me.

Before a recent road trip, I checked out this audiobook so that my wife could meet the three children, and she liked them as much as I did. However, I was not entirely please with the reader, whose British accent left much to be desired and who stressed words oddly now and again. Still, she couldn’t put me off of this wonderfully enjoyable little tale, in which each chapter is almost a story unto itself.  It would be a great book to read to children or to listen to with children because the tale’s narrator, a character herself, often speaks directly to readers and seems to assume that they are children themselves.