• Age: 4 to 8
• Grade: p to 3
• Reading age: 4 to 8

Hop in the car, turn the key, and vrooom away in this bright, bold book for young car enthusiasts!

Vrooom vrooom! Honk honk!

Green means go as readers set off on an exuberant celebration of automobiles. Colorful, graphic illustrations explore the winding roads, tollbooth, fix-it garage, and bridges with vehicles zipping across. It’s the perfect read-aloud for little ones who love all things that go.

Mary Lyn Ray is the author of many picture books for children. Her texts are often praised for their lyricism and emotional depth, and in her works, she frequently focuses on humankind’s relationship with nature. Among her critically acclaimed titles are Stars, Christmas Farm, Pumpkins, The Thank You Book, and Go to Sleep, Little Farm.

Mary Lyn Ray's profile page

JULIEN CHUNG est designer professionnel et illustrateur depuis plus de 25 ans. Il a cre´e´ des personnages pour des marques du monde entier et travaille pour le journal La Presse a' Montre´al, au Que´bec.

Over the past 25+ years, JULIEN CHUNG has created a lot of crazy characters for book publishers, art directors, and product designers around the world. He also designs pages and illustrates everything from superhero ducks to globe-trotting pigs for Montreal’s French-language newspaper La Presse. When he's not drawing animals with hats, Julien enjoys collecting comics and hunting for flea market treasure.He and his wife live in Montreal, QC with a lovebird named Cookie.

Julien Chung's profile page

A child playing with a toy car takes an imaginative road trip.

The onomatopoeic title captures the fervency with which some children love their toy cars. “This is how I drive my car,” the book opens, showing readers a steering wheel as if looking at it from the driver’s seat. Off races a red car on the next spread with a “VROOOM!” in oversized gray lettering on a black background. A couple of spreads later, readers see a large, pitch-black hand holding a tiny car the same color as the red car previously seen: It’s a child pushing a toy, the family poodle also engaging in the play. (At one point, the child even runs the car down the poodle’s back.) The vibrant green, yellow, and red colors of a stoplight—as well as bold, abstract shapes and simple, clean lines—dominate these stylized illustrations that evoke an earlier decade: Many of the cars are shaped as if they belong in the 1950s or ’60s. The child (and car!) even take a nap as well as stop for lunch (a bowl of “all-the-letters soup” that spells out CAR), but then it’s back to zooming: “G is G. O is O. GO.” The streamlined compositions are uncluttered and eye-catching: One spread about the rules of the road shows six large circles laid out in a row; one is red for stopping and another green for go. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A lively ode to play and to things that go vrooom. (Picture book. 4-10)

May 1, 2021