In this crowd-pleasing portrait gallery, 14 burly, rugged, cartoon trucks pose against monochromatic, minimally detailed backgrounds, accompanied by equally muscular captions: “Monster trucks! / Monster trucks! / Big bulldozer trucks. / Scraping and shoveling / with a sneering tooth blade, / leveling the earth / for the roads to be laid.” Todd waxes unabashedly anthropomorphic, endowing each driverless vehicle with both a square-jawed, stern-looking face and a pithy, masculine name like “Brutus, the moving truck,” or “Señor Moo, the milk tanker.” The author supplies measurements and special features for each truck on a final page. Though even uncritical children might observe that Stink the garbage truck’s face is on his back end, and that the forklift’s “stiff upper lip” is actually a lower one, they probably won’t mind. Roar on! (Picture book. 3-5)
