The Silver Arrow
Lev Grossman 

I listened to this audio book and highly recommend it.
Every once in a great while, I read a juvenile book that I suspect (hope) will be remembered by its young readers well into adulthood and a deeper understanding of all the nuance/subtext of the story will become apparent. In the meantime, those young readers are in for a great story with The Silver Arrow. In this first book of a 2-book series, siblings Kate and Tom are visited by their Uncle Herbert just before Kate's 11th birthday. To their surprise, he leaves a train car in their backyard as a birthday gift for Kate. In exploring the train, Kate and Tom discover they can travel in the train to new places. Once they begin to travel, they learn how to operate the train from the train itself and discover they have important jobs to do involving the transportation of animals. The book is filled with fantasy, magic, humor, sibling annoyances, and a whole lot of goodness. This is definitely a middle grade novel, but I could see an adult book group discussing it and then sharing it with their young loved ones!