The Books

Next Stop Grand Central

by Maira Kalman

One Potato Review

“Trains are trips. And trips are adventures. And adventures are new ideas, and romance, and you can’t ever know what in the world will happen, which is why you are going.”
 
And where do trains come from? Kalman is in her element here – at the crossroads of a crossroads. The space may be grand, but this is an author whose interest is the individuals who fill it, indeed this book often reads like it probably needed to get edited down from hundreds of pages, and thousands of little stories, to make it nearly manageable, and even now you are unlikely to be able to remember all of the characters and jobs and subplots (someone actually loses a yo-yo in the torrent). You may think it’s all a bit much, but that’s kind of the point: for endeavors as vast and romantic as Grand Central Station, it’s hard to tell the players from the atmosphere.

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