This is a translation from the highly successful original Korean release. Translation is a greatly under-appreciated skill/talent, and this superb English version is a testament to that art.
I AM THE SUBWAY is written in a the voice of the SUBWAY itself, reminding me of a Greek chorus. This allows the ubiquitous, widely traveled SUBWAY to reveal its deep engagement with its passengers. A small text on the opening endpaper reveals that, in total, Korea has the largest single subway system in the world, averaging 7.2 million travelers per day in the city alone. 
SCRIBBLE, 2024
Kudos to the author/illustrator Kim Kyo-eun and translator Deborah Smith, as well as Melbourn-based publisher Scribble for making this terrific book available to English readers.
The frequently repeated onomatopoeia "ba-dum, ba-dum" suggests the continuous underfoot rhythm and becomes the heartbeat of the lives this system embraces within its walls and on its seats. Despite that vast experience with humans, SUBWAY is locked into its infrastructure. It can infer what lies beyond, but not experience it.
The opening and closing of doors invites vignettes from the lives and voices of various passengers. Their emotions, engagements, and original locations are revealed in double page spreads that grant readers glimpses into family life, urban rush, seaside sustenance families, tiny shop owners, and many more circumstances. SUBWAY notices details, postures, expressions, and relationships among its passengers that reveal and connect to those wider experiences.
This approach of giving voice to inanimate object as observer of daily life serves as mentor text for young writers whose points of view are inevitably first person. Even for early reader/writers, it could suggest an exercise of adopting the "eye" of an object in their bedroom, allowing it voice the observations and assumptions it would make, imagining their lives based on what might happen before and observe after they enter the room. For older writers this is an ideal model of a novel approach to content reporting. Research and learning about regions/cultures might be reported via the voice of some form of transportation or an item that moves hand-to-hand throughout the day. On a simpler scale, a thorough discussion of point-of-view and voice can be structured around the vignettes and encompassing voice of SUBWAY.
The author is also the illustrator, and intertwines narrative (and narrative shifts) with effective language and visual variations to evoke the wide differences in the physical and experiential backgrounds beyond those sliding doors. Each is evocative of daily life and emotional journeys.Readers (and even little lap audiences) are provided complex and subtle details that invite the same degree of curiosity and conjecture that SUBWAY explores. The conclusion reminds us that each day SUBWAY (and we) encounter countless others who are both unknown to us and deeply knowable. The difference is the attention and respect we pay them. In addition, this is an open invitation to visit and learn about modern Korean culture. What a gift this book is to readers.
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