The Year Without A Snowflake! The Little Snowplow Wishes for Snow by Lora Koehler

The Little Snowplow loved his job on the Mighty Mountain Road Crew. All year long, he helped the other trucks with the digging, pulling, and lifting.

But the Little Snowplow loved plowing snow most of all.

Little Snowplow was proud that last year he alone had been agile enough to dig Dump Truck out of an avalanche of snow, and as his birthday approaches, he longs to distinguish himself again, but as winter comes, there's not a snowflake to be seen on Mighty Mountain.

There's no snow in November, and a dearth of the white stuff in December. January is a bust, snow-wise, and in February, there's not a snowflake to be seen. Then it's March, almost spring and almost time for his birthday. Little Snowplow has done more than his share of mundane fall leaf removal and dreary dirt moving, but he's beginning to despair of heroic snowstorm duty.

His heavy-duty buddies notice his moping and try to cheer him up by suggesting some ice-dancing.

"How about the snowkey-pokey on ice?" suggests Water Truck.

Water Truck sprays down the parking lot and turns it into a ice rink, and all the Mighty Mountain trucks shake their bumpers all about. It's fun, but all the crew admit that it's looking like this year will go down as The Year Without A Snow Storm. Even Dump Truck is down in the dumps.

Still, the Mighty Mountain Road Crew push on with plans for Little Snowplow's birthday party.

But when he woke up on his birthday--

SNOW!

Beep, BEEP, VROOM!

Time to roll! Duty calls, and Little Snowplow cheerily rolls out with his big buddies to keep the streets open, and when the all-clear is declared, it's time to celebrate, in Lora Koehler's The Little Snowplow Wishes for Snow (Candlewick Press, 2019). In this sequel to her 2015 New York Times best-seller, The Little Snowplow (see review here), Koehler and illustrator Jake Parker's comedic characters celebrate the can-do spirit of those classic anthropomorphic mechanized heroes of children's literature, with the subtext that sometimes waiting makes for the coolest surprises.

And for more of the guys who go in the snow, share this one with Elizabeth Verdick's winter winners, Small Walt and Small Walt and Mo the Tow (see reviews here)