A BUS CAN'T DRIVE EMPTY

Miller’s alphabet-centered picture book tells a story of a very peculiar bus ride home.

The three main characters are anthropomorphized zebras; one has typical black stripes, another has light blue ones, and the third’sare fuchsia. As the zebras make their way home from school on the bus, the plot progresses in alliterative phrases, such as “Bye-bye butterflies! Mrs. Brown babbles as the bright bus beeps”; each phrase features words that start with a particular letter from A to Z, sometimes to the detriment of plot coherence. Bus driver Chris and the zebras hike over a mountain after the bus runs out of gas; a serendipitously placed log in a river helps the group make the trip home. Fantastical perils stand in the way, including an octopus, before the zebras safely return to their home at the “Zig-Zag Zipper Zoo.” Much of the story is told through Miller’s illustrations, as the text itself is fairly sparse, due to the alliteration restriction. The rough colored pencil images feature no shading, and scribbles in the sky and on the sidewalk are sometimes distracting. However, the sparsity of the text may spark valuable conversations about how to tell stories with images instead of words. Chris is portrayed with brown skin; other human characters show a range of skin tones.

A vocabulary-filled adventure whose illustrations tell most of the tale.