Tuesday Storytime: Trucks

Yeah, I know, why pick this theme for this time of year.  I felt like it.  :)


Tough Trucks
Tony Mitton (Dinosaurumpus), illustrated by Ant Parker
ISBN: 0753456001
Anthro-animals work with slightly cartoonish trucks on jobs with very metered verse blocks.

I really like this one for the vocabulary: study, accelerate, "weave and wend," piston, liquids... really interesting and potentially unfamiliar words for little ones.  The rhyme is solid (sometimes a bit too solid) and perhaps a bit plodding, but it works for the measured pace of the very loose framework of "trucks and truckers working at jobs."  Because the characters are all various animals, there's no indication of gender, except for a waitress-cat wearing a frilly apron.  I would have preferred to see frills on a couple of the truckers/workers or a gender-neutral apron on the wait-staffer, but at least they are animals, so one can plead that they are multi-gendered.


I Love Trucks!
Philemon Sturges, illustrated by Shari Halpern
ISBN: 0060278196
Multi-gendered, multi-ethnic drivers and characters fill a tiny town full of types of trucks.

Our narrator for this very short and simple trucking celebration is a kid playing with trucks in a sandbox, describing various types of truckish jobs that get done while the blocky, primary-colored artwork keeps the environment simple and straighforward and very appealing.  The best-loved truck is an ice-cream truck, so if you're in a rural or ice-cream-truck-less area, be prepared for some really intense questions about trucks that dispense ice-cream.


Trucks Roll!
George Ella Lyon, illustrated by Craig Frazier (Stanley Mows the Lawn)
ISBN: 9781416924357
Abstracted and graphically-intense scenes in forced-perspective or otherwise intriguing compositions.

This is my favorite truck book from today, and might be my favorite truck book in general.  Frazier's graphic art is just phenomenal, and everything from the endpapers (in that bright burnt-yellow industrial corrugated-iron pattern) to the movement and energy blasting out of his pages just makes me so energized and happy as a reader.  The storyline isn't amazing - it isn't really a story, and is really very like Tough Trucks as far as ideas go, but here we stick with trucks on the road, and what they might carry (wild cargoes like rabbits or giant cookies under tarps) and it works much better to have our focus limited to road trucking.  What also works much better is the rhyme and cadence here - we get shorter rhymes and so less interesting vocab, but the words and phrases just leap out, with the coda "Trucks roll" becoming more and more impressive til we reach the end.  Finally, the idea of having the "Trucks stop" in the middle of the book, and ending at dawn (another bravura graphic design, with the shadows on the trucker, the steam on the coffee, and even the hood-ornament as a bird reaching for the sky, all with bright yellow and orange sun rays streaming across) is really brilliant, and a nice change from the usual choice of stopping at "bedtime."   Love this book.