Trucks Roll!

"Trucks bring ice cream.

Trucks bring blocks,

books and bulldozers,

dolls and socks."

Through mountains and flatlands, past deserts and towns, the trucks are rolling! With its rhyming text and bold illustrations, Trucks Roll! invites kids along on a day in a trucker's life and shows that many things we enjoy depend on the trucker's work.

"Lyon's (No Dessert Forever!) rhymes constitute a fairly standard catalogue of big rigs, with little snappiness to invite a return run. 'Trucks have trailers./ Trucks have cabs./ Some haul rabbits./ Some haul labs.' (The last reference is to the dog breed, not research facilities.) But Frazier's (the Stanley series) digitally colored pictures may offer enough visual compensation to hold readers' attention. The illustrator's high-contrast palette and strong, geometric shapes give the pages plenty of retro pop, while also creating a fun sense of texture and dimensionality reminiscent of cut paper. (The nighttime scenes, vividly illuminated by gas station fluorescent lights or the trucks' high beams, are particularly striking.) The trucks are given whimsical cargo to transport, including larger-than-life chocolate chip cookies, toys and fruit. Heroic angles play up the vehicles' star power, and a large-scale, two-page spread devoted to a truck cab interior brings readers up high with the driver. Still, the shelf of truck books is already heavy and, despite novel touches throughout, the captivating artwork alone may not be enough to draw an audience beyond the truly truck-obsessed. Ages 4-7." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Rolling,

honk

rolling,

rolling.

That's trucks...

Craig Frazier is a designer and the author and illustrator of the series Stanley Goes for a Drive, Stanley Mows the Lawn, and Stanley Goes Fishing. Craig is also the author of a personal monograph, The Illustrated Voice. His illustrations frequently appear on the pages of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and various business magazines. He is the designer of the 2006 Love stamp for the United States Postal Service. He is married with two children and lives in the San Francisco Bay area.