Kid's Book Blog

Each season brings its own challenges to the workers at the Village Garage. In spring, they clean up winter's debris from the roads and wash their trucks. In summer, they patch potholes, deal with damage from a thunderstorm, and host a Fourth of July party. Autumn brings falling leaves, sucked up by the Elephant Truck, and a broken pipe to mend. In winter all is quiet until a big snowstorm comes, and they must clear the roads. Children will enjoy watching this amiable crew balancing work and play as the year cycles through the seasons. Adding bits of fun along the way, the simple text explains their tasks without too much detail. Nicely varied in composition, the appealing pencil, gouache, and acrylic illustrations offer wonderfully childlike depictions of the workers and their machines. Great for kids fascinated by outdoor workers, this picture book offers a welcome change of pace from more basic volumes on trucks.

A perfect read aloud to the boys or girls who love trucks - dump trucks, wood chipers, street sweepers, backhoes etc. It's all about trucks and the things they do during the different seasons of the year.
A cute story!

By Emma Garcia
Colorful cars beep-beep, toot-toot, vroom-vroom, and whoosh across these collage-like pages, inviting kids along on an entertaining trip. Little ones will love joining in with the sounds, reading them aloud as they watch a little red jeep, big blue van, sleek black sports car, long pink limousine, and big yellow taxi pass by. But what do you get when all these vehicles make their distinctive sounds at the same time? A lot of chugga-chugga, honk-honk noise! But in the end each vehicle finds its parking space and, like all good children, settles down for the night.


Toot Toot Beep Beep follows up on the highly successful Tip Tip Dig Dig. Recommended for any car obsessed child.

Ages 4-8

"It was dark. It was stormy. It was night." The opening lines to this easy reader is a really great example of using simple words and repeition to get a point across to kids. To a young reader, "It was a dark and stormy night" may be a daunting sentence to read. Half of the words in that sentence are not familar to those little eyes causing frustration. But when the kids already know, "It was," the sentence goes much easier. Plus, what a great opening line to a book!


The storyline is cute: Melvin has a flat tire and needs a new one. He rolls into a spooky junkyard and finds just what he needs: a golden! But when the junkyard ghost asks, "Who took my golden tire?" Melvin gets scared.

The illistrations by David Shannon are vibrant and so very cute. This is a great boy book because it is about trucks, but girls won't be offended by it either because the art and  personified car is not overly masculine.

My only complaint is that sometimes the word placement is wonky, not exaclty left to right. This might confuse a new reader. OR it might make reading the book more interesting. Not sure.

I really liked this book.