Trucks Trucks Trucks

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. (Apr.)