By Tony Mitton
Cartoon animals drive every kind of car there is, in a rhyme your child will chant back at you, with all the parts labeled on the page.
A crew of cheerful animals shows you what cars do. They wash one, fill it with fuel, look under the hood, change a tire, and drive a whole range of them - a family car, a sports car, a racing car, a convertible. The verse thumps along in a rhythm made for chanting, and the pictures do the real work: the engine, the steering wheel, the tires, the exhaust are labeled right on the page, with a picture dictionary at the back. It's the same pair who made Amazing Airplanes and Roaring Rockets.
A car-obsessed child usually wants the words before they want a story, and this hands over the whole machine, part by part, inside a rhyme easy enough to memorize by Thursday. It's the middle ground between My Car, which names about six things, and a reference book they can't read yet - enough vocabulary to feel like real knowledge, short enough to finish at bedtime. Nothing in it has any tension at all.