Tuesday Storytime: Wheels in the City

Got a fun new rhyming book in, and made an easy match with some of my perennial favorites.

Zoom! Zoom! Sounds of Things that Go in the City
Robert Burleigh, illustrated by Tad Carpenter
ISBN: 9781442483156
Personified objects and busy, sharp-edged, primary-color illustrations.

The main stanza rhymes are easy to find on each spread in a blocked-out section of the busy pages, but the same can't be said for the "sound effects" - which is my only quibble.  The sounds are actually illustrated into the spread, and share the same saturation and color and design as the page around it - making them a little hard to find during a busy storytime.

Not too long, not too complicated, and a nice mix of types and varieties of vehicles - from skateboards to subways to concrete mixers - all experience a day in the busy city, from earliest morning of joggers and delivery trucks to latest night of home-going partiers and tired subway riders.




My Car
Byron Barton
ISBN: 9780060296247
Bright blocky childlike shapes, in vivid contrasting colors.

Sam tells the reader directly all about his car, which he loves, washes, cares for, fuels, and drives carefully into town to begin his work as a bus driver.  (In our delivery this morning, we got a new Byron Barton book that has a bus on the cover.  If this is a sequel to My Car, I'm going to be really happy.)  Short, direct, straightforward, and still has lots of fun details - a breakdown of the parts of a car (body, chassis, wheels, steering wheel, engine) a nice snapshot of a gas station (with a really amusingly dated price tag for the gas), and a collection of street-signs to identify.




The Adventures of Taxi Dog
Debra and Sal Barracca, illustrated by Mark Buehner
ISBN: 0803706715
Reading Rainbow Book: illustrations are thick vivid oils over acrylic in grimy but vibrant colors.

This book has an ulterior motive - it's written to raise awareness of the plight of city strays.  However, that simply forms the origin story of Maxi the Taxi Dog, and at about the halfway point, it moves from being the story of his rescue into the story of his life working the streets with his taxi-driver owner Jim.  They pick up interesting fares: from the opera singer to the requisite wife having a baby to the even more requisite how-many-clowns-can-fit in the taxi scene.  The story is written in delightful rhyme that I personally find super-easy to read with feeling and humor.  There are sequels, but none are quite as good as the original.