Customer Reviews

Working Hard With Mighty Backhoe (Tonka)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Do you know a child who loves trucks and tractors? Then this is a GREAT BOOK! My son just loves it! Wonderful story and teaches how the backhoe really operates in a language that children understand.

My son Devon just loves it when I read to him about the little boy named Billy who really loves backhoes, because Devon is fascinated by backhoes too. Backhoes are really several trucks in one. They can do the work of a bulldozer, an excavator, a front end loader and if you attach a clamshell to its arm, it can even do a much of what a crane can do. The beginning of this nice Tonka shows the big trucks in action and the second half of this book shows Billy with his toy Tonka backhoe and it shows how he makes friends with other kids in his neighborhood, who also have Tonka truck toys. This is a good book to have around if you have a little boy at home. Devon recommends in highly and so do I.

I have a 3-year-old son who LOVES trucks. We have LOTS of truck books. Unfortunately, someone gave him this book as a gift, and IT IS TERRIBLE! For starters, the truck in all of the illustrations is NOT a backhoe! The text describes the bulldozer-like attachment, but the pictures never show it! There is no logic to the book at all. The kid rides in the cab of the moving truck to his new house. Where do the movers sit? When they arrive, he goes out to play, and a hard hat suddenly materializes on his head. The boys next door are rude to him for no reason, then decide he "knows his trucks" and invite him over to play. Who would want to play with the rude kids next door? The story stinks and the illustrations are even worse. Obviously there was no editor involved in this project. Tonka is just trying to make a quick buck and hopes you'll be the next sucker. In the author's defense, the information about the backhoe is well written, but that doesn't help the story, and I wonder if the illustrator even read the text.