LOVE IS A TRUCK

Love Is a Truck is the second book in Amy Novesky and Sara Gillingham's "Love Is" series, and it's a true delight to experience it. This is a book for children who love ice cream trucks and fire trucks and flatbed trucks, and children who love riding, organizing, and parading trucks around. But it's also a love story about love itself.

We see the child playing with his trucks, using them to interact with members of his family and make connections between trucks and love. It's not only a story about the hobby itself, it's also a story about this particular child's love of the hobby. The kid's enthusiasm shines through on every page through onomatopoeia, color, and metaphor, and the fact that the kid is genderless is absolutely perfect for the text. Trucks are for boys and girls, and the ambiguous child makes for a perfectly relatable character to carry us through the book.

This is one of those books where the photos cannot possibly do it justice. We see what looks like woodblock prints mixed in with the screen prints, and these dual media only highlight the texture of the pages. The pages of the book are raised cardboard so there are ridges across each that pair perfectly with the printed illustrations. And with a limited color palette, Gillingham is able to work every color to the max by representing it in different shades and textures.

Love Is a Truck comes out from Cameron Kids on Tuesday, November 1!