by Candace Fleming and Eric Rohmann
Our local library has a huge collection of picture books and board books. It’s a little cumbersome for little kids to browse the big shelves, so they helpfully have a few bins near the front with specially sorted books: staff favorites, familiar cartoon characters, and our go-to, vehicles. We’re always hoping to find a new favorite, so we always grab a few based solely on their covers. We recently checked out Bulldozer’s Big Day.
What the book is about
Bulldozer arrives at the construction site, hoping to hear well-wishes on a special day. Each truck around the site is working hard on their own work, and he grows more and more disappointed. In the end, he learns that their important work was actually building a giant birthday cake for him, and he hadn’t been forgotten at all.
Our take on Bulldozer’s Big Day
We didn’t really care for this one. My kid liked the trucks, of course, but was confused by the story. He couldn’t really tell that what they were working on was a cake (it’s sort of a giant metal drum looking thing) and needed a good deal of explanation to understand what was happening on each page.
From a personal pet-peeve point of view, some of the trucks are doing “work” that doesn’t really make any sense for the kind of trucks they are. The digger is “scooping” (okay, sounds good), but then the dump truck is “sifting” (?), the cement mixer is “stirring” (??) and the grader is “chopping” (???) I guess they’re doing cake-related actions rather than construction actions? The concept doesn’t really hold together for me.
The illustrations are cute, with thick black outlines on very recognizable construction trucks. My toddler was confused about where everybody goes at the end of the book – presumably they’re all just out of sight, enjoying the birthday celebration, but it’s a little odd not to have a finale celebration picture.
My Verdict
Overall rating: D
Doesn’t work for me as a birthday book or as a construction truck book. The concept is nice but it’s not really intelligible to a little kid.
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