By Chris Van Dusen
A boy tells his dad exactly what car he'd build if anyone let him, and it has a swimming pool in it.
Jack takes his father around the car he has designed. It's called the!Zoom!, and it is not a normal car. There's a fireplace and a snack bar in the back, a swimming pool, a robot driver called Robert who takes over when you're bored of steering, and it flies, and it goes underwater. Jack explains all of it in confident rhyming couplets, like a man presenting to a board. Van Dusen paints it in glossy 1950s-showroom style - chrome, fins, curves - so the whole thing looks like a car advert from a future that never happened.
Every other car book tells your child what a car is. This one asks what a car could be, and it hands the question to a child rather than an engineer - Jack isn't dreaming vaguely, he's specifying, and that's the part an obsessed child recognizes in themselves. It's also the funniest book on this shelf and the one most likely to end with your child drawing for an hour. If they've spent two years memorizing what cars actually do, this is the release valve.