VROOM VROOM GARBAGE TRUCK

A 30-page tour de force of a board book that is even better than its title would suggest.

Given a toddler’s natural fascination for heavy equipment in general and for garbage trucks in particular, this volume could have offered far less and still been a hit. But, surprise, this cleverly written and lovingly rendered volume should prove an absolute delight for caregivers and tots alike. This onomatopoeic opus is ideal read-aloud fun, a slice-of-life snapshot of a garbage truck featuring all the signature sounds that alert tykes that the truck is nearby. It’s still dark when the titular truck wakes to the “plip plop” of raindrops and then starts with a click, headlights on, ready for a creaking, clanging day of rubbish collection. The illustrations are charming and economical, imbuing the protagonist with huge amounts of personality with surprisingly few (satisfyingly thick) lines. The text is hand-lettered into each illustration; the volume of each “rumble” and “vroom” is conveyed calligraphically, by the relative sizes of the letters. The day of sanitation engineering is replete with drama and triumph, whether braking for ducklings or backing up (“beep beep beep!!!”) to collect trash from a man who overslept (“AAAAAAAAAAAH!!!” is the one line of dialogue in the book). The smiling truck dumps its load from its aft end in a panel that could have come from a book on potty training and then heads home for the night.

The book may be about garbage, but it’s pure gold.