The Smash! Smash! Truck
Grade 1–4—While appearing to be a simple book about recycling and recycling trucks, this volume tries to be much more—to confusing ends. Readers start the journey following glass bottles and jars into a recycling truck that takes them back in time 14 billion years to the big bang. Seven bubbles of text are used to explain atoms in lines such as, "All things are made of atoms," "We could see atoms if we made things a billion times bigger," and "The smallest dot on this page may contain 10 million atoms." From there, recycling is explained in terms of the nature of matter, with a warning about toxic dumps, and eventually makes its way back to the recycling truck that readers see on the cover. Short sentences (including some that swirl with the images) and text in varying fonts and in the form of bubbles pull readers' eyes from place to place across the spreads. The busy, colorful drawings incorporate a mix of neon colors, along with some cartoon art. For a better book on recycling, try Gail Gibbons'sRecycle!: A Handbook for Kids(Little, Brown, 1992) or Meyer Seltzer'sHere Comes the Recycling Truck(Albert Whitman, 1992; o.p.).—Stacy Dillon, LREI, New York CityCopyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.