Truck Full of Ducks. By Ross Burach.
Scholastic. $17.99.
Ranger Rick: I Wish I Was a Gorilla. By Jennifer Bové. Harper.
$16.99.
Ross Burach has a seriously skewed sense
of humor, and it is in full flower, or maybe full feather, in Truck Full of Ducks. The concept itself
is ridiculous, and the cover illustration – showing a baseball-cap-wearing dog driving
a truck in the back of which 11 very different-looking and very strange-looking
ducks are cavorting – certainly sets the scene. The back cover takes things a
step (or flutter) further: it is a roadside billboard for the duck-delivery
company, promising to deliver ducks anytime and anywhere and sporting the
motto, “Look for the truck with the quack in the back!” And those are just the
book’s covers. There is lots more ridiculousness inside. The inside front cover
shows the ducks getting ready for a day’s work: they have storage lockers and
benches to sit on and lunchboxes and pizza to nibble and a newspaper to read
(front-page headline: “Stuff Happened”) and a Bladder Buster drink featuring
two swirly straws and a coffee mug saying “Is It Friday Yet?” And there are
motivational/advertising posters on the walls, one of which announces, “Voted 3rd
Fastest Duck Delivery Service in Town,” which is sure to make kids wonder who
came in first and second. And we are not even up to the book’s title page!
Eventually the story starts with the dog boss taking an order on his
duck-shaped phone (amid much other duck décor) and heading the duck truck out
onto a street where a sign pointing left says “this way” and one pointing right
says “that way” and a yellow describe-the-road sign shows the road ahead
twisted into spaghetti, only with more curlicues. One of the ducks then eats
the directions, and now there is real
trouble – and a great plot, as dog and ducks try to figure out who placed the
order. It is not the little girl: she called for a mail truck to take her boxed-up
little brother “very far away.” It is not the construction worker: he wanted a
dump truck, and the one that shows up says “Humpty Dumpty Had a Great Haul” on
its side. It is not the shark, pig and crab, three buddies who called for an
ice cream truck – but that’s just fine with the duck truck, since the ducks on
the truck quickly tuck into iced treats of all sorts. Everything would be just
ducky if the boss dog could figure out who called for the truck – no, not the
pirate, and not the alien, and not the man who has had more than enough of
ducks and called for a duck removal
truck. Eventually, very eventually, the mystery is solved, with a visit to the
address of 1 Scary Way in the Deep Dark Woods – a place that the ducks enter with
shivers, as one of them puts the finishing touches on his last will and
testament. But everything turns out just fine – Burach would not have it any
other way – and the ducks eventually head back to the office, along the way
passing a “Van Full of Toucans.” And that is merely the end of the main story –
there is still more amusement on the inside back
cover. Burach has the mind of a six-year-old, more or less, or at least the
ability to channel one – and Truck Full
of Ducks will delight kids on both sides of that approximate age, say from
ages four to eight. Oh – and it will also delight adults who, like Burach
himself, obstinately refuse to stay grown up.
The writing is simpler and more direct in
another book for the four-to-eight age range, Ranger Rick: I Wish I Was a Gorilla. But the message here is far
more down-to-earth and entirely factual. This is a Level 1 book (“simple
sentences for eager new readers”) in the “I Can Read!” series. It is also a
book with an intriguing premise: Jennifer Bové asks kids to imagine what it
would be like to be a gorilla. She then writes as if the wish has come true,
explaining where and how gorillas live, what they eat, and how they behave.
Photos of gorillas in the wild are the main visual element here, with
occasional questions from Ranger Rick, the National Wildlife Federation’s cartoon
raccoon. For instance, Bové explains that gorillas live in rainforests, where
“the weather is often cloudy with lots of rainy days,” and the raccoon asks,
“Do you play outside on rainy days?” Questions like this help focus young
readers’ attention on differences between humans and gorillas. But there are
also plenty of similarities, which Bové’s text and the photos highlight. Mother
gorillas kiss and cuddle their babies; baby gorillas like to play – they run
around and climb trees; young gorillas engage in wrestling and chasing games
with their friends; and so on. There is information here on gorilla language –
that is, the meanings of several sounds gorillas make – and gorilla food,
including “leaves and stems” of plants, “roots and fruits,” and sometimes
insects. And here Ranger Rick asks, “If you ate like a gorilla, what food would
you miss?” The combination of interesting photos with simple but accurate
textual description and occasional questions makes this book a very good first
look at the world’s largest primates. And there is additional information at
the end, including a place to go online to learn more about gorillas. There is
also an amusing recipe for humans that is called “Ants on a Stick” but that is
somewhat different from the ants on a stick that gorillas really eat: for
humans, the idea is to take sticks, or rather stalks, of celery…coat them with
cream cheese or peanut butter…and then stick raisins to the coated areas “so
that they look like ants crawling along a stem.” Add a little gorilla language,
and kids can imagine, if only for a moment or two, that any wish they had to
become gorillas has temporarily come true.
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