My three-year-old loves Michael Slack’s new picture book Monkey Truck, which tells the tale of a mythical monkey/truck hybrid superhero who patrols some distant jungle, saving animals from minor annoyance, danger, and sticky situations. Monkey Truck feasts on mountains of bananas and makes disgusting, banana-scented farts, and does a lot of revving, exciting stuff as he zips around the jungle (which means lots of chances for me to make exuberant vroom-vroom noises).
When a tsunami is visited upon the jungle, Monkey Truck is the animals’ only hope: he roars around the jungle with his chameleon friend (saved from squashing by a careless elephant), piling animals high on his back — hippos, bats, anteaters, wild pigs — and then he outraces the tsunami’s front and gets all his friends to the top of a hill. Monkey Truck!
The artwork is great, colorful and elaborated with lots of details that are fun to talk about during storytime. All told, it’s a darned fun storytime treat.
