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Smash! Crash!

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SMASH! CRASH! Jon Scieszka; New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007; unpaged.
If you are looking for a book to rile your little boys up more than they already are, Smash! Crash! is for you. Jack and Dan are two trucks who love nothing better than tooling around Trucktown all day crashing into hard-working trucks who are trying to do their jobs: Melvin the Cement Mixer and Monster Truck Max, for example. In the end their destructive tendencies are harnessed for good by Wrecking Crane Rosie who needs some help tearing down an old building. Jack and Dan, Melvin, Max, and Rosie, as well as all the rest of Trucktown, are brightly colored and painted in bold strokes (by David Shannon, Loren Long, and David Gordon) to appeal to all those little dudes who can't wait for the tower of blocks to be built so they can smack it down. Although I like a ripsnorting, guy-oriented picture book as well as the next person, as an old boring slow-moving vehicle myself, I found Jack Truck and Dump Truck Dan to be annoying and destructive, but I'm not the target audience, am I?

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