(++++) BOARD BUILDERS

Let’s Build a Highway. By Robert Pizzo. Sourcebooks. $7.99.

Let’s Build a Playground. By Robert Pizzo. Sourcebooks. $7.99.

     To interest the very youngest children in books and reading – well before they are capable of actually reading on their own – board books have to be cleverly designed, colorful, simple, forthright, easy to follow, and neatly written for short-to-almost-nonexistent attention spans. The result is that the books are often extremely clever while at the same time being formulaic: they go through numbers 1-10, through the alphabet, through easy-to-follow stories or easy-to-grasp facts, and their vocabulary is simple to the point of predictability – as parents who read multiple board books, or the same ones again and again, know all too well.

     Every once in a while, though, somebody comes up with a genuinely new twist on board books – one that seems all the more surprising because of its sheer rarity. That is what Robert Pizzo has done with Let’s Build a Highway and Let’s Build a Playground. On the face of it, these are simply square-shaped 26-page books made without the sorts of fancy design elements that some authors and illustrators use to set their works apart from the crowd: there are no cutouts or popups here, no dials to turn or portions of pages to fold or open, no special-feeling rough or smooth areas with which little fingers and hands are supposed to engage. But these books have something that makes them very special indeed: words. Simple the narratives may be, but the words Pizzo uses here are quite different from the ones usually to be found in board books – and, for that matter, in books for slightly older kids than those for whom board books are intended.

     So, yes, Let’s Build a Highway shows work crews and their equipment, all drawn with Pizzo’s usual attractive geometric precision and in suitably bright and contrasting colors. But how many board books, in explaining what “we’ll need” to create this road, show not only a dump truck and bulldozer but also “a roller compactor,” “road mesh,” “a trestle,” “U-channel posts,” and more items along those lines? There is simply no other board book that presents the underlying engineering of a highway with this level of detail and explanation. Pizzo’s illustrations of the various elements of highway-building are exceptional, managing both to simplify machinery and to show it with a surprising level of detail and accuracy. And the book’s words are used not only to introduce the elements needed for road-building but also to show, in a completely age-appropriate way, just how each required piece of the construction project is employed. One left-hand page, for example, shows road mesh as a parallelogram-shaped metallic section containing six smaller parallelograms. “We’ll need road mesh,” that page says, and the facing, right-hand page says “to strengthen the road” – and shows construction equipment bringing the road mesh to a place where two workers lay it flat and spread it out. Everything is at once very stylized and very clear – a pattern that carries throughout the book. “We’ll need some bolts,” says a left-hand page that shows three large bolts; “to fasten the guard rails,” says the facing right-hand page, on which two workers are seen using the bolts to put those rails together along the side of the road. Instead of a book teaching “A is for Apple” and “Z is for Zebra” – there are plenty of those – Let’s Build a Highway introduces very young children to “a roller compactor to flatten the gravel,” “a trestle to support the overpass,” and more. The result is an exceptional learning experience.

     Let’s Build a Playground follows the same approach. Even the youngest children may recognize the slide and seesaw on the cover of this book, but how many kids – or adults, for that matter – will expect to open the book to find out about “a forklift to bring the equipment in” and “a loader auger to dig holes for the posts”? Again, Pizzo shows these pieces of heavy equipment in simplified art that at the same time gets all the basic parts of the machines right and will make it easy for children to identify them if they ever see them actually creating a playground. It would be fascinating to be on hand at a construction site where an enthusiastic four-year-old pointed to the work being done and said, “Look, Mommy, a loader auger!” Let’s Build a Playground actually gets into considerable detail about the elements needed for this particular project: “metal chains to hang the swings,” “a socket wrench to fasten the monkey bars,” “a cordless drill to attach the crawl tunnel,” and more. Parents themselves may learn from this book, as when Pizzo writes of the need for “truss screws to set up the slide” – and shows that specific type of screw, and the method of employing it, very clearly indeed. This turns out to be, in fact, quite an elaborate playground, including a fort, a dome, a zip line, and even “X and O tumblers for the tic-tac-toe,” an oversized game that looks like so much fun that kids may be disappointed if their real-world playground does not have it. Let’s Build a Playground and Let’s Build a Highway are exceptional board books on many levels, managing to communicate some complicated ideas and concepts clearly and in an age-appropriate way, to show components of engineering/ construction projects with attractive clarity, and to give very young children a taste of unusual vocabulary words – along with some familiarity with the ways in which taken-for-granted elements of everyday life are created.