LITTLE TRUCK

A day in the life of a little pink truck.

Little Truck travels fast and climbs hills, accompanied by a salmon-colored larger truck, likely a caregiver stand-in. This flatbed truck follows Little Truck, giving him a boost up a hill, and after Little Truck goes into a tunnel and becomes lost for a couple of page turns, he emerges fast asleep on the back of the larger truck. Each double-page spread depicts a scene from Little Truck’s journey and is accompanied by one to three sentences of simple text, which often reads as if the bigger truck were speaking with Little Truck. Gomi’s signature style is in top form here. All this master uses to create the bodies of the trucks are squares, rectangles, and circles, adding dots and dashes to create eyes, mouths, and rosy cheeks to give them personality. The deliberately sparse backgrounds of tawny browns, tans, and deep grays allow the trucks visually to pop off the page. That this little pink truck is explicitly given the masculine pronoun is a delightful, gender-norm–busting detail.

Toddlers will instantly identify with this simply adorable little hero as he rolls through life.