Roll 'Em! Cars Galore by Peter Stein

CARS AND MORE CARS. DOING THE CHORE CARS. REV 'EM UP AND MAKE 'EM GO CARS!

A thoroughly modern, digitally illustrated picture book with a deliciously retro feel, Peter Stern's and Bob Staake's Cars Galore (Candlewick Press, 2011) features a seemingly endless passing parade of creatively varied vehicles, with continuously curvaceous roadways which sinuously swirl and circle and double back over themselves in a style which keeps the eye in motion and the pages turning.

Stern's energetically rhyming text, echoing the fifties classics of Dr. Seuss and P.D. Eastman, is both familiar and unique, in a rocking urban setting in which cars are the stars:

JAZZ CAR, SOUL CAR. ROCK 'N' ROLL CAR. BLUES CAR, SONG CAR. SING-A-LONG CAR.

And artist Bob Staake's preposterous cars--shark cars, Noah's Ark as zoomobile cars, cars with multiple centipede legs,-stinky, smelling like a skunk cars--and their exotic passengers will keep readers' poring over the visual humor on each double-page spread even as their fingers itch to turn the page and see what's next in this motor mania.

Our family cars are all things to us--part living room, part convenient appliance, and part family pet--all without losing their innate mystique of freedom, and this affection shines through on each imaginative page. There's even a promise for the youngest motorhead reader:

FUN DRIVE, SUN DRIVE, GOTTA RUN DRIVE! DREAM DRIVE, COOL DRIVE... SOMEDAY YOU'LL DRIVE!