Transportation: How People Get Around by Gail Gibbons - OPTIONAL

Gibbons, Gail   Transportation: How People Get Around   32 pages. Holiday House, 2017. $17.95. NONFICTION PICTURE BOOK

Various scenes of transportation are illustrated and labeled in the author's recognizable style. She begins by introducing different modes of transportation with simple sentences that identify the means by which people travel: on roads, on tracks, in the sky, or on water, while labeling the scenes as cars, trains, aircraft, and boats. She then goes back and repeats these categories. She includes more illustrations of each kind while offering a few simple facts through her sentences and labeling. She concludes with a page about transportation in space, three pages of scenes depicting a combination of transportation vehicles, and one page of important signs, signals, and navigational aids.

I found the book's formatting confusing. Many pages have an obvious heading, but the pages without headings do not always fit under the heading that came immediately before. Some of the spreads work as one large scene, and some depict two separate scenes, though it is not always immediately apparent which it is. Some of the pages are split in half or quarters by white spacing between panels, but at first glance the white spacing just looks like part of the illustrations, especially in layouts with roads or tracks. My other complaint is that the sizes of the vehicles are often not to scale, even within the same scene. For instance, a station wagon is depicted as longer than a shuttle bus,  a motorcycle as longer than a van, and a compact car as taller than a station wagon. That being said, the pages are full of well crafted, detailed illustrations of loads of vehicles that some kids will be thrilled to study.

EL (K-3) - OPTIONAL. Reviewed by P. K. Foster, MLS, teacher- librarian