‘It’s Halloween!’ / You come, too.” As they drive, they are surprised (and joined) by many of their friends in costume. Little Blue Truck and his buddy Toad are off to a party, and they invite readers (and a black cat) along for the ride: “ ‘Beep! Beep! Beep!’ / says Little Blue. Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own tree that will put a twinkle in a toddler’s eyes.Ī lift-the-flap book gives the littlest trick-or-treaters some practice identifying partygoers under their costumes. The short, rhyming text is accented with colored highlights, red for the animal sounds and bright green for the numerical words in the Christmas-tree countdown. Though it’s a gimmick, it’s a pleasant surprise, and it fits with the retro atmosphere of the snowy country scenes. The last tree is already decorated, and Little Blue gets a surprise along with readers, as tiny lights embedded in the illustrations sparkle for a few seconds when the last page is turned. The final tree is reserved for the truck’s own use at his garage home, where he is welcomed back by the tree salestoad in a neatly circular fashion. These five trees are counted and arithmetically manipulated in various ways throughout the rhyming story as they are dropped off one by one to Little Blue’s friends. Little Blue loads up with trees at Toad’s Trees, where five trees are marked with numbered tags.

The truck is decked out for the season with a Christmas wreath that suggests a nose between headlights acting as eyeballs. The sturdy Little Blue Truck is back for his third adventure, this time delivering Christmas trees to his band of animal pals. Rounding out the pleasing circularity of events is a little girl’s happy discovery of little yellow bird’s feather: “Mama! What a good day!” A glorious celebration of the simple joys of childhood. The full-page illustrations, framed in the same brown ink that delineates each animal, appear opposite the minimal text, allowing the child reader to absorb each scene in its entirety with the turn of a page. Henkes uses the bold lines and serene compositions that were the hallmark of his Caldecott Medal–winning Kitten’s First Full Moon (2004), adding sunny watercolors for an appropriately cheery whole. Each creature’s turnaround unfolds in reverse order, small shifts in behavior and attitude making the change. ” The ellipsis has magic in it, turning all these bad days into good. What makes a good day good? This deceptively simple work opens with calamity: Little yellow bird has lost his favorite tail feather little white dog’s leash has gotten tangled up in the fence little orange fox has lost his mother and little brown squirrel has dropped her nut.

Little blue truck makes a friend