Giant Vehicles (Inside Vehicles)

A gallery of gargantuan delights guaranteed to leave young fans of mountainous machinery panting with pleasure.

The boardlike pages allow for lift-the-flap features, as many as seven per spread. Open the flap for a glimpse of what's inside as well as a brief caption commenting on it. Children intrigued by the subject will pore over the handsome illustrations--intricately detailed pen-and-ink drawings with colored-pencil shading. An engaging, interactive learning experience.

Green and Biesty explore the biggest of the big in this oversize book devoted to vehicles. Among the eight featured are the Airbus A380 passenger plane, the Caterpillar 797F dump truck ("It's as big as a house, and if it were carrying bricks, it could hold enough to build at least eight houses!"), the Typhoon submarine, and the Maersk Triple-E container ship. Each vehicle receives a spread of its own, with cutaway cross-sections and small flaps offering peeks at its inner workings. Biesty's detailed colored-pencil illustrations demonstrate how each machine operates, with labels and captions explaining how various components work together. An informative and appealing resource for readers with a serious interest in what makes things go. Ages 5-9. (Aug.)

Copyright 2014 Publishers Weekly, LLC Used with permission.

Gr 1-4--"Larger than two blue whales, taller than five giraffes, and weighing more than 130 elephants, the world's largest passenger plane is the Airbus A380." The double-decker super-plane is among eight air, land, and water vehicles featured in this large (12" 9") lift-the-flap board book. The others are a cargo train that stretches a mile and a half; a huge Russian-made helicopter; the American Saturn V rocket that carried three astronauts to the moon in 1969; the Caterpillar 797F dump truck; the cruise ship Oasis of the Seas; the Russian navy's submarine the Typhoon; and the Maersk Triple-E container ship. Each spreads across the double page in a realistic drawing with some cutaway views and additional small sketches among surrounding bits of labeled text describing physical and mechanical features. Four or five flaps are embedded in each scene, lifting to show some internal detail and a brief explanation. Small thumbholes set into the board page are nearly invisible among the drawing's details, so the flaps are not easy to spot on the page. Explanations are succinct and sometimes dense. Occasionally they're quite confusing, as when they claim that the "Giant Jumbo" plane's fuel--some 84,535 gallons of it--is stored in the plane's smaller rear wings, shown as sleek and flat. Though the cardboard format makes this book look like it's intended for a younger audience, the detailed explanations will appeal to older readers, while teachers or parents may enjoy explaining it to younger ones. Libraries might find it has appeal in browsing collections, and inventive teachers may find the size and weight comparisons useful.--Margaret Bush, Simmons College, Boston

Copyright 2014 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Each double-page spread illustration is surrounded by insets and details, along with heaps of effective, economical explanation and jaw-dropping facts and stats. Lift the flaps (many rather cleverly concealed and requiring sensitive fingers to ferret out initially) for a peek not only into the interiors of the vehicles (so that's where the engineer's toilet is on the supertrain) but also at the structural materials, such as aluminum ribbing on the Airbus fuselage.
—Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books