Junkyards in the US and Canada receive 12 million vehicles a year, and here the creators of Tractor Trailer Trucker: A Powerful Truck Book (2000) follow one typical junker from its arrival on a big flatbed to its eventual rendezvous with a truly humongous car shredder. In sharp, artfully angled, color photos, Borns records the stops along the way, as seven kinds of fluids are drained, its tires join a "sea of tires" awaiting recycling, reusable parts are torched off, battery and radio are removed, and what's left is mashed into a two-foot-high metal pancake in preparation for its final mastication. The Vermont salvage yard where most of these pictures were taken even has an electronic inventory database, and much of what can't be resold is systematically recycled. Mitchell imbues her captioning text with breezy exuberance ("Out With the Mashed . . . In With the Smashed"), and closes with a glossary, a page of statistics, and even a list of Web sites. Junkyards have always been as much a kind of rusty Magic Kingdom as a source of cut-rate car parts; children will want to take this memorable tour more than once. (Picture book/nonfiction. 5-8)
Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-58246-034-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Tricycle
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
Part of a spate of books intent on bringing the garbage collectors in children’s lives a little closer, this almost matches...
Listeners will quickly take up the percussive chorus—“Dump it in, smash it down, drive around the Trashy town! Is the trash truck full yet? NO”—as they follow burly Mr. Gilly, the garbage collector, on his rounds from park to pizza parlor and beyond.
Flinging cans and baskets around with ease, Mr. Gilly dances happily through streetscapes depicted with loud colors and large, blocky shapes; after a climactic visit to the dump, he roars home for a sudsy bath.
Part of a spate of books intent on bringing the garbage collectors in children’s lives a little closer, this almost matches Eve Merriam’s Bam Bam Bam (1995), also illustrated by Yaccarino, for sheer verbal and visual volume. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: April 30, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-027139-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
``Water is dew. Water is ice and snow.'' No matter what form it takes, seldom has plain old water appeared so colorful as in this rainbow-hued look at rain, dew, snowflakes, clouds, rivers, floods, and seas. Asch celebrates water's many forms with a succinct text and lush paintings done in mostly in softly muted watercolors of aqua, green, rose, blue, and yellow. They look as if they were created with a wet-on-wet technique that makes every hue lightly bleed into its neighbor. Water appears as ribbons of color, one sliding into the other, while objects that are not (in readers' minds) specifically water-like—trees, rocks, roots—are similarly colored. Perhaps the author intends to show water is everything and everything is water, but the concept is not fully realized for this age group. The whole is charming, but more successful as art than science. Though catalogued as nonfiction, this title will be better off in the picture book section. (Picture book/nonfiction. 5-7)
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-15-200189-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
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