Little Blue Truck

Author: Alice Schertle
Illustrator: Jill McElmurry
Publisher: HMH Books for Young Readers
Purchased: Barnes & Noble (the now closed, Fifth Avenue location)

Why: Before my son was born, when I was hoping I would raise a child who loved to read (and not realizing that I was, in fact, creating a baby completely obsessed with reading) we asked friends to bring books to our shower to help build a library. Unfortunately, as you may have read from my earlier post on the 3 Books Never to Give Your Expecting Friend, we got a LOT of the same books. But at least one of those came with a gift certificate – so I was able to exchange it and get this one instead. This book stood out because it seemed pretty clearly geared toward boys with the bright blue cover and it being about trucks and all. Plus it seemed to have good rhymes. Sold!

Pros: It’s about a good-natured truck! Who overcomes the bad behavior of others with kindness! Who doesn’t want to embrace that lesson every day?! While you might think this is a quick Disney trip down Cars lane, that’s not the case, and this is a story that certainly stands alone (though it doesn’t have to since it has a sequel of sorts – “Little Blue Truck Leads the Way” — to be covered later, and yes, we already own that one too). The rhyming in this book is superb – easy flow, easy to read, easy to return to again and again. Although as I noted above, my first impression was that this was a “boys” book, it really is a universal story with appeal to boys and girls. No reason to exclude!

Now one interesting element to this book is the color palette — very toned down as compared to your “typical” picture books, or at least I thought so. For that reason it might not capture the attention of the littlest babies since it doesn’t have the bright shapes and contrast that their early vision can pick up. That’s obviously not a hard and fast rule, just something that applied for us and I thought I’d mention.

Note the toned down colors.

Durability: 3 bite marks. Wear and tear along the edges, though holding up pretty well given the chewing this has been subjected to.