Just enough information for toddlers on the go.
It’s a truck jamboree! Over 40 trucks, some playful, some practical, rumble across the pages of this board book.
Brief, repetitive rhyming sentences describe the action. “Trucks make ditches. / Trucks make hills. / Trucks make highways. / Yikes! No Spills!” Older preschoolers may begin to recognize key words. Fanciful illustrations characterize this diverse trucking world. The monster truck on the cover is painted like a tiger. Another with super-high struts is decorated with flames. Unusual trucks like a weather-tracker vehicle and a space rover are included alongside the expected firetruck and tow truck. Diversity extends to the people, too. The ice cream truck is staffed by a White woman and a brown-skinned man while the customers include a White man and child, a South Asian woman in a sari with a baby and toddler, and a youngster with a Black mom who uses a wheelchair. The truck drivers defy gender stereotypes as well. The trash truck driver is female, as is the excavator operator. Unfortunately, the pictures are small so these details may not be noticed. Still, truck-obsessed toddlers returning to study this compendium will absorb the multicultural tone. Fewer specialized planes to describe and a subject young children have less direct experience with make Go, Planes, Go!, published simultaneously, less successful.
Just enough information for toddlers on the go. (Board book. 1-4)Pub Date: April 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63217-316-4
Page Count: 22
Publisher: Little Bigfoot/Sasquatch
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
A perfect piece of treasure it is not, but shiver me timbers, it’s fun.
Two pirates and their parrot companion embark on adventures to the tune of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”
Following Car, Car, Truck, Jeep (2018), Charman and Sharratt team up again for this swashbuckling, musical tale. The two buccaneers and their parrot spend a day at sea engaged in such maritime activities as scrubbing the deck and hoisting the sail along with quintessentially piratical chores like digging up buried treasure. At the end of the day—which culminates in a nonviolent walk across the plank—the two pirates return home. Charman’s rhyming text has a nice cadence, and thanks to the cover note to sing along to the tune of “Row, Row, Row, Your Boat,” it moves along at a nice clip. For the most part, the rhymes work neatly into the tune so that it reads easily the first time through. Sharratt’s black-outlined illustrations are boldly colored and eye-catching. The pirates themselves are not obviously gendered; one presents white and the other has light-brown skin. Most of the ocean creatures have anthropomorphized features—a mostly successful choice with the exception of the jellyfish and octopus, shown awkwardly with humanlike noses and smiles (and, oddly, eyebrows for the octopus). Overall, this one holds high appeal for little readers, and the nature of the singsong-y, rhyming text will make it a highly requested reread.
A perfect piece of treasure it is not, but shiver me timbers, it’s fun. (Board book. 1-3)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5476-0319-0
Page Count: 24
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
A Christmas train book that gets derailed by a lacking story arc.
Not quite the Polar Express….
Sobel’s rhyming text fails to deliver a clear premise for the eponymous goodnight train’s Christmas Eve progress through the pages, and Huliska-Beith’s acrylic paintings embellished with fabric and paper collage don’t clarify the storytelling. At the start of the picture book, a bevy of anthropomorphic animals decorates a rather rickety-looking engine, and then human children gather around and pile into train cars that look like beds and cribs. The train follows a track, seemingly in pursuit of Santa’s sleigh, but to what end isn’t clear. They travel “through a town of gingerbread” and through the woods to find the sleigh blocking the tracks and the reindeer snoozing while, mystifyingly, Santa counts some sheep. Perching the sleigh on the train’s cowcatcher, they all proceed to the North Pole, where the “elves all cheer. / Santa’s here until next year!” But then the goodnight train just…leaves, “heading home on Christmas Eve.” Was this a dream? It definitely wasn’t a story with a satisfying beginning, middle, and end. Santa’s face is never seen; the human children and elves are diverse.
A Christmas train book that gets derailed by a lacking story arc. (Picture book. 2-4)Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-328-61840-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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