Food Trucks!

Food Trucks is a hybrid picture book that combines creative illustrations of fictional food trucks, humorous rhymes, and non-fiction factoids about food truck food. I found the book’s concept unique and clever. I think young readers will have an appetite for learning the etymology of “hamburger”, the two types of clam chowder, and that May is National Salad Month.

Some readers may find the verse challenging. The rhyming patterns and syllable counts are inconsistent. More than once, I found myself wondering whether a particular page was intended to be a rhyme at all. Some of the rhyme pairs are off, e.g., fruits-boot, burger-further, and cheese-leaves. And when spoken aloud, the irregular meter could cause some readers to stumble over some of the stanzas.

The illustrations are funny and wonderfully whimsical. For example, the BBQ truck has giant cow horns, a smoker on the roof, and has a sign “Bubba Q”. Using window shades and wipers to create eyes, each truck is anthropomorphized and given its own personality. The artwork contains little humorous details for the reader to discover, like the “GD4U” license plate on the salad truck. Young readers will be hungry for more of these trucks.