Animobiles

March 15, 2018
Animal-vehicle hybrids are on the move by land, sea, and air."Some vehicles go VROOM! / Some animals say ROAR! // Put them both together / and find out what's in store!" Take, for instance, a lion and limousine mashup, with a lion chauffeur driving around lion glitterati, or a tiger-styled train full of tiger commuters speeding down the tracks. "Down beneath the river / swims a SALMON-SUBMARINE. / It glides against the current / as it travels up the stream." Cow cars "MOOOve" through the farmlands, and monkey mopeds zip through the jungles. There are seal ships and bee blimps and even subway snakes, bat balloons, and bear busses and tractor turtles all full of the animals they resemble. "These passengers had so much fun-- / in water, land, and sky. / But the animals ARE ON THE GO... // so HONK / and say 'Good-bye!' " Frost's couplet-filled, rhymefest of silliness is sure to please young animal lovers and very little vehicle connoisseurs. The candy-bright illustrations, nearly all double-page spreads, are packed with happy commuting animals and were created digitally using painted textures. Additional details, such as baby turtles playing at the beach and accessorized fish, delight.Vehicular verses with an animal twist: storytime candy. (Picture book. 2-7)

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May 15, 2018
Preschool-G Here is a delightfully silly mash-up of animals and vehicles. The fact that both vehicles and animals can produce big noises ( Some vehicles go VROOM! Some animals say ROAR! ) is the somewhat shaky pretext for combining the two. The sound aspect gets lost pretty quickly. But readers of this lively rhyming text probably won't mind the disappearing, as they encounter intriguing vehicles like monkey-mopeds, bat-balloons, tractor-�turtles, bee-blimps, and a slithery subway-snake. Brightly colored, mixed-media illustrations pop off the page. The hybrids move across a variety of landscapes, from jungle to open seas to deep down underground and the story also moves through the day, ending in a most gratifying double-page spread in which all the animal-vehicles encountered drive and soar around the scene. Comic details abound, as in the piebald cow-car with ears adorning the roof, or the pajama-wearing bears on the bear-bus that carries them back to their dens. A fun read that could inspire readers' own imaginative mash-ups.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)