Bedroom garages outfitted with this little auto are sure to be sites of requests for repeated readings.
An automobile stand-in for the young and the restless rejects the siren song of bedtime.
This book may offer the chance to sing it in its entirety to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” but readers should think hard before committing to it. To that most familiar of tunes, a spunky red car leaves its garage at bedtime to zip and zoom past various fellow vehicles at night. They all—tractors and diggers, planes and fire trucks—get a chipper nighttime salute from the zippy vehicle. After an evening of high energy, at last the auto is ferried back to its cozy home, ready to let the “beep-beep dreams begin.” Simply reading the book is just as effective as (if not more so than) singing it, and it has the lilting cadences common to bedtime fare. There’s even a bit of levity, as when a number of vehicles respond to the little car with their signature sounds. There is an old car (“Ah-OOH-ga!”), an ice cream truck (“Zing!”), a truck (“HONK!”), and an improbably rude-sounding school bus (“BLARG!”). Artistically, the soothing hand-printed linoleum blocks, digitally collaged in shades of brown, red, blue, and yellow, lend the proceedings a calming atmosphere.
Bedroom garages outfitted with this little auto are sure to be sites of requests for repeated readings. (Picture book. 3-6)Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4814-8803-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A thought-provoking tale of growth and change.
The Pumphrey brothers bring their now-signature style to this tale of an old sleigh that, like the vehicles in The Old Truck (2020) and The Old Boat (2021) before it, works hard in a changing world.
As the story opens, readers see a Black-presenting child and parent chopping firewood and loading it into a horse-drawn sleigh against a snowy landscape. “In a small town,” we learn, “an old sleigh gave all it took.” Parent and child deliver the firewood throughout the town, making it “merry and bright.” But the small town grows bigger, and the old sleigh’s wooden body begins to break down. The industrious child turns some of its planks into a new sled and uses it to deliver smaller loads of firewood. In the final pages, readers see that the child’s parent has repaired the old sleigh, which the child, older now, uses to deliver firewood in the “small city” that has sprung up. Some readers may be left with questions: Is the figure driving the sleigh at book’s close the child, now all grown up? And can a city really spring up that fast? On the whole, though, the narrative beguiles as sleigh and sled haul their loads from verso to recto across each scene. The community’s buildings stand out against the snow in reds, greens, and mustards, and the simple and rhythmic text charms.
A thought-provoking tale of growth and change. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781324054122
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Norton Young Readers
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
Who ya gonna call? A different snowplow book.
Friends don’t let friends expire in snowdrifts.
Convoluted storytelling and confusing art turn a cute premise into a mishmash of a book. Scooper’s a front loader that works in the town salt yard, replenishing the snowplows that arrive. Dumper’s her best friend, more than happy to plow and salt the roads himself. When the big city calls in Dumper to help with a snow squall, he brushes off Scooper’s concerns. Yet slippery roads and a seven-vehicle pileup launch poor Dumper onto his side in a snowbank. Can Scooper overcome fears that she’s too slow and save the day? Following a plot as succinct as this should be a breeze, but the rhyming text obfuscates more than it clarifies. Lines such as, “Dumper’s here— / let’s rock ’n’ roll! / Big city’s callin’ for / some small-town soul” can prove impenetrable. The art of the book matches this confusion, with light-blue Dumper often hard to pick out among other, similarly colored vehicles, particularly in the snowstorm. Speech bubbles, as when the city calls for Scooper’s and Dumper’s help, lead to a great deal of visual confusion. Scooper is also featured sporting long eyelashes and a bow, lest anyone mistake the dithering, frightened truck as anything but female. (This book was reviewed digitally with 11-by-17-inch double-page spreads viewed at 16.8% of actual size.)
Who ya gonna call? A different snowplow book. (Picture book. 3-6)Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5420-9268-5
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Two Lions
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
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