How to Track a Truck

by Jason Carter Eaton, John Rocco (Illustrator)

Overview

For kids who love trucks, here comes the definitive guide to catching and taming one of your own from the creators of the hit picture book How to Train a Train.

Want a pet truck? Rumble up to this handy guidebook offering everything you need to know. Bone up on habitat: monster trucks like abandoned parking lots; moving trucks live in busy neighborhoods; ice-cream trucks and snowplows migrate in the winter. Pick the right breed for your home (a car transporter in a small apartment would not be a wise choice). Learn to identify your truck by its tire tracks, and soon, with the lure of some orange cones, you’ll have a loyal vehicle following you home, a happy hum under its hood. With an eighteen-wheeler-size nod to pet-care guides, Jason Carter Eaton and John Rocco put young readers in the driver’s seat for a road trip to truck-dreamer bliss.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780763680657
Publisher:	Candlewick Press
Publication date:	09/27/2016
Pages:	32
Product dimensions:	9.70(w) x 11.90(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

Jason Carter Eaton is the author of How to Train a Train, illustrated by John Rocco, and Great, Now We’ve Got Barbarians!, illustrated by Mark Fearing, among other books for children. Jason Carter Eaton has written for such diverse venues as McSweeney’s, Cartoon Network, MGM, and BBC Radio and has done extensive work with 20th Century Fox animation/Blue Sky Studios. He lives in Westchester, New York.

John Rocco is the illustrator of How to Train a Train by Jason Carter Eaton and The Flint Heart by Katherine and John Paterson. John Rocco’s picture book Blackout received a Caldecott Honor. He is also the jacket artist for Rick Riordan’s best-selling Percy Jackson and the Olympians series and has collaborated with Whoopi Goldberg on the picture book Alice. Previously a creative director at Walt Disney Imagineering and preproduction director for the film Shrek at DreamWorks, John Rocco lives in Los Angeles.

Editorial Reviews

Rocco’s large cartoon illustrations are very appealing and give tons of personality to the “pets.” The vibrant colors are bold on the pages, inviting readers in. A lovely storytime read-aloud. Children will be lining up to check this out. Another must-have for fans of titles about vehicles.
—School Library Journal

From the Publisher

10/01/2016
PreS-Gr 2—Don't want a train for a pet? How about a truck? First, you need to know how to track one. And to do that, you need to decide what kind of truck you want so you will know where to look. Then you need to use your best detective skills to find and lure one. Once you have chosen the perfect truck to fit your lifestyle and it responds to the Universal Truck Signal, you need to name it, play with it, and treat it with kindness and love. There is a truck out there for everyone! From the creators of How To Train a Train, this book on acquiring a vehicle as a pet is sure to please fans and newcomers alike. This fun and lively volume is chock-full of moving vans, monster trucks, garbage trucks, car transporters, ice-cream trucks, snowplows, and dump trucks. Children will love identifying the various vehicles and determining which one they would prefer to have as a pet. Rocco's large cartoon illustrations are very appealing and give tons of personality to the "pets." The vibrant colors are bold on the pages, inviting readers in. VERDICT A lovely storytime read-aloud. Children will be lining up to check this out. Another must-have for fans of titles about vehicles.—Amy Shepherd, St. Anne's Episcopal School, Middleton, DE

School Library Journal

2016-07-20
An Asian boy named Mike narrates a guide to finding and taming a truck as an unusual type of pet.In this companion to How to Train a Train (2013), Eaton and Rocco again imagine hunting and capturing a huge transportation vehicle, taming it, and taking it home. Narrator Mike has his own garage and owns two dump trucks and a fire engine as his personal pet trucks. He advises readers on various types of trucks and recommends looking for a truck “in its native habitat.” Mike explains how to catch a truck by using a trail of orange traffic cones and recommends finding the pet truck a “useful project” and other trucks for playtime. Seven children of different ethnicities find and name their own pet trucks and then watch as their pets work together in an imaginative construction project in a way that’s described as “pure magic.” Several illustrations of the children may have safety-conscious adults sucking their teeth, with some kids riding on top of moving vehicles and others standing perilously near to trucks in motion. An extra-large trim size accommodates the big rigs, but the human characters are proportionally tiny and somewhat lost in the design. The trucks themselves don’t work visually either as pets or as individual characters. Their headlights serve as eyes, but the vehicles never seem alive or particularly appealing. These trucks are stuck in a concept that isn’t up to speed, with a plot that ultimately sputters and runs out of gas. (Picture book. 4-7)

Kirkus Reviews