Farmer Dale’s Red Pickup Truck by Lisa Wheeler

MaryAnne Locher reviews FARMER DALE’S RED PICKUP TRUCK (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $7.99, Ages 2 and up) .

Are you ready to take a ride in Farmer Dale’s Red Pickup Truck? (Author Lisa Wheeler has the reader chugging along down a country road in her rhyming board book. Wheeler’s words and Ivan Bates’ illustrations give personality to the farm animals that fill the pages and Farmer Dale’s truck. Until…

The truck bounced up. The springs all popped.

The bumper bumped. The pickup stopped.

With the truck broken down on the side of the road, tempers flare. Then, cow, pig, goat, sheep, rooster, and Farmer Dale, work as a team to try to figure out how to get the over-loaded truck moving again. Until…

The pickup bounced and shimmied.

It groaned and squeaked and wheezed.

It spit a thankful cloud of smoke

and started with a sneeze.

The rhyme in this book moved along perfectly, even when the pickup truck didn’t. The illustrations of the anthropomorphized animals were full of life. My favorite part of the book is the ending. Not because I want the book to be over, this is one I’ll read many times over, but because there are even more animals to see and Bates’s illustrations paint a picture worthy of another story.