Review by Booklist Review
The author of The School Trip (2001) offers another picture book featuring a resourceful child in control of his world. Sam, who is obsessed with construction vehicles, enters a site on a dare and starts up the steamroller. After flattening a fence and a car, he uses a cement mixer to dump a load onto the street and then hoists a police car with a crane. Sam's perfectly logical explanations for his actions will both surprise and please young listeners, sending them back to the illustrations for clues to Sam's exploits. Hoogstad's colorful, cartoon-style art includes many fascinating details, and she makes good use of vivid hues to draw attention to specific portions of the art and away from pastel sections where important (but unmentioned) activities occur. This works best for one-on-one sharing and will be popular with heavy equipment aficionados and fans of Sherri Duskey Rinker's Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site (2011).--Weisman, Kay Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Veldkamp (Tom the Tamer) and Hoogstad (Monster Book) offer an unabashed fantasy in which a boy named Sam causes all manner of mischief at a construction site. When the workers go on break, the boss asks Sam to "keep an eye" on the site. "And if anyone does enter the site, call the police!" he adds. The childlike tone of the storytelling plays right into the fantasy: after "two big boys" show up and dare Sam to enter the site, he readily agrees. "I'll go in," he says, "but then you must call the police!" So begins a wild series of events as Sam flattens a car with a steamroller, pours out a heap of wet cement, and hoists the arriving police car into midair with a crane. Readers paying attention the backgrounds of Hoogstad's loopy, pastel-colored scenes may get a hint of why Sam is embarking on his path of destruction, and all is revealed in the final pages. Not only does Sam get to drive some big trucks around, he gets to be the hero, too. What more could a kid want? Ages 3-6. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
PreS-Gr 2-Sam is told to guard the construction site but not to let anyone in. If anyone goes inside, he is to call the police. While Sam is on watch, two big kids try to go inside, but Sam offers an alternative-he'll go into the site if they call the police. The big kids agree, and despite their pleas for him not to, Sam plays on the equipment. He goes on the cement mixer, the steamroller, and the tall crane. High jinks ensue, and Sam ends up hoisting the police into the air with his crane and offering an explanation for his behavior: he had to foil a bank robbery! Sam's good deed is rewarded with his very own hard hat so he can go into the construction site whenever he wants. While the illustrations are quirky and have a vintage feel, the story itself is a little lacking. The twist ending, in which Sam stops robbers from getting away, comes out of left field as the illustrations do not hint that he has spotted these events taking place. The vocabulary is stilted and old-fashioned. Children who love construction equipment will not care about these elements as they will enjoy looking at the pictures; however, there are much better books featuring steamrollers, cranes, and cement mixers already out there. VERDICT A supplementary purchase.-Paige Garrison, Augusta Richmond County Library System, GA c Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
