Five Trucks - Softcover

Brian Floca has written and illustrated one other picture book, The Frightful Story of Harry Walfish, and previously illustrated Helen Ketteman's Luck with Potatoes. For older readers he has collaborated on several books by Avi: Poppy, winner of the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award for fiction, and three other connected stories about the same woodland characters, as well as the graphic novel City of Light, City of Dark, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of they Year. A native of Texas, Brian Floca now lives in New York City.

Add this title to your short list of Favorites for Truck Lovers. The book begins with a title-page illustration of a boy and a man struggling with a heavy suitcase; the scene shifts to five drivers walking toward their trucks. As the simple story unfolds, a series of five double-page spreads shows each driver at the wheel of his own special vehicle. One truck is large and heavy, another long and straight, but they are all headed in the same direction. The next series of spreads shows each truck in action: food is unloaded from the catering truck, luggage is unloaded from the baggage carts pulled by the tractor, luggage travels up the baggage conveyor, and so on, until the final image shows the drivers waving to an airplane as it climbs in the skies. Children who have never pressed their noses to an airport window may not recognize the setting, but others will have a chance to remember what airport trucks look like and learn what they do. If picture books about trucks are so easy to do, why do we see so many poor ones and so few as good as this? Floca offers a book that's simple enough for a two-year-old (prime age for the young truck enthusiast), without being boring or simple-minded. The artwork, ink line with watercolor washes, uses every spread to good advantage, showing the camaraderie of the drivers, and even the time of day, as clearly and subtly as the functions of the trucks. A pleasing picture book to read and (get ready, parents) reread. Carolyn Phelan