Amazon.com Review
Trucks that plow, trucks that roll, trucks that haul, trucks that lift--Matt just can't get enough of his favorite toys. When asked to clean his room, he puts away his trucks, socks, and teddy bears, but not in the way his mom probably intended. With each succeeding page, his toy trucks grow, until Matt is driving the mammoth vehicles over the rubble of his bedroom, scooping up laundry and hockey sticks. As the trucks increase in size, so do the words in the margins describing what the trucks are doing (pushing, rolling, scooping, loading). Finally, Matt's room is clean, his trucks in a basket, and he's ready to go outside where a whole other world of bulldozers, backhoes, and tractors awaits!
Truck-love is as inevitable a developmental stage as crawling and toilet training. This book is sure to be an all-time favorite, with its bright yellow gouache paintings of trucks, trucks, and more trucks. Peter Sís has a knack for this kind of focused look at childhood passions. He has written and illustrated many popular picture books, including another trucky treatise, Fire Truck. (Preschool) --Emilie Coulter
From Publishers Weekly
In this well-conceived book, a boys love for his prized toys feeds his imagination. Ss (Fire Truck) opens with a predominantly white spread of a boys room, the furnishings outlined in fine black line, populated with yellow miniature trucks and a yellow-haired boy. A line of text running vertically up the right-hand side reads, Matt, will you pick up your trucks? Matt picks them up all right, but not before having some fun. He drives them to their bin one at a time, each one carrying him further into a fantasy construction site. As he pulls on the string of a little truck hitched to a plow, the word plowing pulses in yellow type up the right-hand page, and in successive spreads, the truckand the textgrows bigger, until in a fold-out three-page spread, Mat is LIFTING a crane (holding a striped yellow sock) from inside a huge, fantastic vehicle, with orange sausage-like type bursting out of the page. The penultimate spread shows Matts last clean-up effort as he takes the crane truck (still holding the sock) to the bin. As a reward, Mom takes him outside to view the same vehiclesall full-sizeat work on a vacant lot. Ss introduces additional colors only in the blue siren atop each vehicle, and in the various colors used for the text at the right of each spread; through his brilliant use of yellow, he keeps the focus on the boy and his trucks. By cleverly evoking the way a child uses creativity to construct his own fantasy world, the author gets readers all revved up too. Ages 3-up.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
