A Fire Truck for Chuck

Submitted by cmreviewadmin on
Author
Annika Dunklee
Illustrated by
Cathon
Toronto, ON: Owlkids, 2018
32 pp., hardcover, $18.95
ISBN
978-1-77147-285-2
Grades
Preschool
Ages
Birth to age 4
Review by
Beth Wilcox Chng
Excerpt

“A truck! A truck! A fire truck!”

“How much?”

“A buck.”

What luck! A fire truck and for only one buck.

A Fire Truck for Chuck is a sweet story about a little boy who loves his toy fire truck. The text has a strong emphasis on words that rhyme with the truck, and almost every sentence in the book ends with the letter “k”. Its tongue-twisting sentence fragments make the story a bit of a challenge to read aloud, but many children will enjoy hearing it.

The cartoon illustrations by Cathon were created with hand-drawn ink lines and coloured in Photoshop. They show a boy and his mother in stereotypical gender roles. While a cute story, A Fire Truck for Chuck is overall bland and unexceptional. The attempts at playing with sound seem forced, but the book will probably find an audience among truck-loving preschoolers.

Recommended
Reviewer

Beth Wilcox Chng is a teacher-librarian in Prince George, British Columbia. She is a graduate of the Master of Arts in Children’s Literature program at the University of British Columbia.