I LOVE PLANES!

Sturges and Halpern (I Love Trains!, 2001, etc.) team up again for the not-unexpected airborne entry in their series of picture books on the apparatus of travel. A child, most likely a little boy, declares his love of flying machines of all kinds from planes and jets to balloons and gliders. He lists the things he’d like to do while in the air: “I want to land on the sea and not get wet, / Then zoom to grandpa’s in my jumbo jet!” The bottom line: he loves planes. Halpern’s bright, full-bleed illustrations are as charmingly simple as before. Sturges’s rhyming text will lend itself to quick memorization. Young flight enthusiasts will soon be taking off on solo reading jaunts. Front and back endpapers, much like the previous volumes, feature a sentence or two of information next to pictures of each flying machine. The whole book would work well for group sharing, while those endpapers would be a perfect stepping-off point for one-on-one sharing with older preschoolers. (Picture book. 3-6)