By Richard Sutton, Elizabeth Baquedano
The car taken apart and photographed piece by piece, from the first horseless carriages and the Model T to a modern engine cut open, every part labeled.
It's built like a catalog of parts, not a story to read through. Seventy-two big pages of things photographed against white and labeled: whole cars, a cut-open engine, a carburetor, a gearbox, dashboards, hood ornaments, a bare tire. It works through the history too, from the earliest horseless carriages and the Model T and the famous marques up to modern cars, and it keeps stopping to open the machine up so your child can see what's actually inside. A child might land on a cutaway, sit with it a while, then flip off to a page three sections away.
Cars have an edge over most subjects a child gets obsessed with: there's one sitting in the driveway. So a photograph of a real cut-open engine matches the thing under your own hood in a way a drawing never can, and the page and the car outside line up. This is the book a car-obsessed child reaches for once the names aren't enough and they want the machinery - how the engine turns the wheels, what all the parts are for. For a reader who won't sit still for a chapter book, flipping through and reading the labels still counts as reading. And because you consult it rather than finish it, it doesn't get shelved and forgotten; a child comes back to it for years as the harder pages start to make sense.