Building - Hardcover

Kindergarten-Grade 2-Architects, carpenters, masons, backhoes, cranes, lunch trucks, scaffolds, plastic sheets, and Porta Pottis are all part of the fascinating process of turning a vacant lot into a multistoried office building. Cooper fills these white pages with loosely sketched, watercolor-and-pencil renderings of construction-related people and things as he chronicles the events on a building site. The text design often reflects the activity taking place on the page and sometimes requires readers to rotate the book. The illustrations effectively capture the bustle and camaraderie of the multiethnic and gender-balanced crew, but are occasionally too blurry to be easily interpreted. The hand-printed labels accompanying some drawings are also frequently illegible. However, the text not only delivers a realistic description of the sights, sounds, and even smells of a construction site, but can also be whimsically fanciful, as when the backhoe "gnaws into the earth and scoops up dirt like a messy eater trying to bring food to its mouth." The challenging vocabulary requires a more sophisticated audience than Sue Tarsky's The Busy Building Book (Putnam, 1998), but this book hits the nail on the head for slightly older sidewalk superintendents.
Carol Ann Wilson, Westfield Memorial Library, NJ
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.