A hit for girls who identify strongly with girlhood and love things that go.
Girl power meets things that go in this colorful early picture book.
Girls with diverse skin colors, hair colors, and hair textures drive, conduct, steer, speed, rev, fly, build, load, dump, and rocket in vehicles of many different types. A spread introducing three girls being active in their vehicles is followed by a spread calling out the sounds their machines make (“VROOM! goes Emma. / HOOT! goes Meg. / CLANK! goes Jayla”), then a spread saying “GO, GIRLS, GO!” This three-spread pattern repeats with three new girls and vehicles each time. From trains and tractors to tugboats, taxis, planes, and motorcycles, these girls “go” in every way, working, playing and saving the day. Girls from previous spreads help girls on later spreads, showing an ideal of cooperation and unity that furthers the value of the girl-power message. On the last “GO, GIRLS, GO!” spread, all the girls march together, some holding signs for peace, equality, and womanhood—a touch that may tip the balance a bit too far into the realm of didacticism for some tastes. The illustrations feature bright primary colors, block shapes, patterns, stars, and large, clear fonts that will appeal to young audiences. With repeated readings, pre-readers will be reciting the words on their own.
A hit for girls who identify strongly with girlhood and love things that go. (Picture book. 3-6)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5344-2482-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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A picture-book favorite despite minor flaws? That’s a 10-4, good buddy.
In McCanna and Frawley’s cheery picture-book debut, miniscule vehicles drive into supersized action.
Accompanied by a bouncy rhyme, several brightly colored trucks rumble through the garden: the lead red-and-blue truck, the more feminine purple truck and the gridlock-loathing aqua truck. Though the color palette and cartoon appearance of the nameless vehicles may seem like a carbon copy of Disney’s Cars (2006), illustrator Frawley has included humorous details for each truck, giving them life beyond their big-screen predecessors. For instance, the red-and-blue truck has jaunty eyebrows created from roof lights, the purple truck’s short bursts of steam look like daisies, and the aqua truck’s expressive eyebrows are actually wiper blades. The illustrations help tell a hilarious story, most notably of a traffic jam featuring a frog, slug and worm who are clearly not amused by the crowded garden path. McCanna similarly handles the text well. The rhythmic pattern is clear, most of the rhyme is spot-on—“Teeny tiny tires. With teeny tiny treads. / Leaving teeny tiny trails between the flower beds”—and the story begs to be read aloud to a group. Typical trucker talk is included in the dialogue—“Breaker breaker, Buddy!” “What’s your twenty, Friend?”—and the lingo is explained in a short glossary at the end of the story. Though the premise is amusing, the proportion of the trucks in relation to their surroundings can be a bit inconsistent. Most images depict the trucks, which are “smaller than a dime,” as being only marginally bigger than ants and bees, yet other images portray the trucks as being much larger—almost half as long as a box of animal crackers. Nevertheless, this delightful story will charm truck-loving children.
A picture-book favorite despite minor flaws? That’s a 10-4, good buddy.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0989668811
Page Count: 24
Publisher: Little Bahalia Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Surreally unsatisfying.
The trip to Grandma's house goes through many remarkable places.
A light-skinned child with short dark hair, surrounded by scattered toys and pictures and crayons, hardly seems ready when Mom announces that it's time to go. They're barely out of the neighborhood before the first "Are we there yet?" And that question is repeated over and over as they drive their little red car on a highway filled with various vehicles, across a long suspension bridge, and through farm country and then a desert. Even these ordinary settings have weird touches in McCauley’s vivid, posterlike double-page spreads: there’s a worm riding in a giant paper airplane near the bridge; a minotaur stands in the farm’s field; and a T. Rex looms in the desert. The locations grow quirkier, going underwater and even into outer space, where a young three-eyed extraterrestrial in a flying saucer echoes, “Are we there yet?” Finally at Grandma's house (which is surrounded by topiaries of many of the figures seen along the way), the child astonishingly pronounces the journey: "Boring." McCauley's mixed-media illustrations are bright and slyly amusing; readers will thrill at picking out the peculiar details, most of which have their roots in the child’s toys scattered at the beginning. Was the duo’s anything-but-boring journey all in the child’s head? Regardless, the cynical punch line seems to undercut what appeared to be a celebration of the boundless imagination.
Surreally unsatisfying. (Picture book. 3-5)Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4521-3155-9
Page Count: 36
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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