Digger, Dozer, Dumper

Sixteen boisterous, rhyming poems — each one highlighting the job and personality of a different vehicle, from a backhoe to an ambulance to a snowplow — invite young children to meet their favorite trucks face-to-face. Cheerful illustrations show each one in action, digging (or dozing, or dumping) away. Engaging visual details like an anxious turtle crossing the street just ahead of a steamroller are sure to keep preschoolers poring over the pages as they consider the question, “Trucks as far as eyes can see. . . . Which truck would you like to be?”

Starred Review These delightful, finely crafted, informative, fun verses can serve as Common Core exemplar texts while satisfying truck and poetry fans. Each rig’s function is described with great care and attention to language with seamless rhymes, alliteration, and assonance gracing the selections. Nothing seems forced about Vestergaard’s rhymes; they’re smooth and sure, and easy to set to memory… This book is intelligent and informative, with craft, rhythm, great art, and entertainment.–Teresa Pfeifer © 2013

Starred Review: Vestergaard (Potty Animals) offers 16 poetic tributes to big machines and trucks that should prove deeply satisfying to young connoisseurs and the grownups who read to them. Rising above the usual singsong name-checking, Vestergaard celebrates not only the jobs these machines perform but also their marvelous mechanics (the garbage truck’s hydraulic arms; the levers of the agile skid-steer loader). And she consistently makes word choices that offer both catchy aural hooks and powerful, concise descriptiveness…Each machine gets a humanlike expression on its grill (or, at the very least, a pair of googly eyes), and a crew of hardworking, hard-hatted kids and one eager, floppy-eared dog help get the jobs done. © 2013

This collection of poems introduces 16 hardworking vehicles, from a little street sweeper tidying up the neighborhood to a mighty semi barreling down the highway. In the framework verse, three children are invited to try out the trucks. While the verse concentrates on the accomplishments of each vehicle, the illustrations show the kids (and sometimes their cheerful canine companion) in the driver’s seats. The rhythmic, rhyming verse is expressive as well as informative. The final spread gathers all the vehicles together and, with the turn of a page, transforms them into toy trucks moved about by the children. Fun for reading aloud, especially one-on-one.
— Carolyn Phelan © 2013

Adorable multiethnic children are the drivers of these 16 trucks—from construction equipment to city trucks, rescue vehicles and a semi—easily standing in for readers, a point made very clear on the final spread. Varying rhyme schemes and poem lengths help keep readers’ attention…While there are many rhyming truck books out there, this stands out for being a collection of poems © 2013