King of the Road! Revenge of the Dinotrux by Chris Gall

IT WASN'T FUN BEING STUCK IN A DRAFTY MUSEUM.

TYRANNOSAURUS TRUX WAS NOT HAPPY. KINDERGARTEN DAY AT THE MUSEUM MEANT LOTS OF SCREAMING... BANGING...AND LOTS OF CHEWING GUM ALL OVER HIS CLAWS.

For the Dinotrux on exhibit, Kindergarten field trips are worse than ice ages with an asteroid strike thrown in for free. They've had it up to their headlights with being fossils! Finally, they decide to blast their way out of their exhibit hall.

Dinotrux run amok!

Crashing and smashing their way through the walls of the museum, the Dinotrux take their protest to the streets! Garbageon gobbles clunker cars; Dumplodocus crunches on houses; Velociscraper lowers his blade and does some unsolicited landscaping right through the middle of town. And in the ultimate dinotrux insult, Cementosaurus makes an, er, deposit, dumping right on the steps of City Hall.

Something must be done. The Mayor points out that the Dinotrux behavior is positively primitive and shames them into submitting to a re-education experience at the local schoolhouse. At first the Dinotrux are defiant and give the school kids an example of some really prehistoric classroom behavior. But then they discover something that wasn't around back in the Jurassic Age--monster truck books! The Dinotrux discover reading and soon are reformed--just in time to get in on the city's newest civic construction project--a dynomite Dinotrux-enabled playground.

Chris Gall's newest, Revenge of the Dinotrux (Little, Brown, 2012) combines two killer-diller subjects, dinosaurs and BIG construction vehicles, with just a touch of a King Kong monster meme thrown in as Tyranosaurus Trux clambers up the Empire State Building to make his protest. Kids will chortle as such monster trucks as Semisuarus and Rolladon rumble through the city in a anti-fossil protest at their exhibitdom. Be sure to read this one with its prehistoric tongue-in-cheek predecessor, Dinotrux for a prehistoric truckin' time.

I Can! : Melvin Might? by Jon Scieszka

Cement Mixer Melvin worries.

Melvin worries "I might get dirty."

Melvin worries, "I might get stuck."

"I might get worried," Melvin worries.

Melvin the Mixer is a machine who likes to, um, turn things over in his mind. And when his friends Jack the Truck and Payloader Pete show him their latest tricks, well, Melvin should be worried.

Jack and Pete exhort Melvin to follow them in their latest Evel Knievel daredevil routine, an act which involves roaring downhill, launching themselves from a broken bridge, soaring over an deeply excavated work site, and splashing and nearly crashing onto the other side. Rescue Rita, the little emergency vehicle, feels sure she can roar and soar with the biggest of them, but Melvin is prudent enough to realize that Jack and Pete's fun is pure folly!

"Oh, no!" says Melvin. I can't try THAT!"

But when Jack and Pete splash down safely on the other side of the abyss, little Rita screws up her courage to begins her downhill run. She roars. She soars. But Rita doesn't quite splash. Rita finds herself stuck at the edge of the hole and beginning to roll backward toward the bottom. "Help, help!" she beeps, but the daredevil machines are over the hill and far away, and if Rescue Rita is to be rescued, it's going to have to be the timid Melvin!

In an kid-pleasing four-page gate fold, we see Melvin roaring to rescue Rita, soaring off the bridge, spraying cement to close up the gaping excavation, and slowly shoving the little EMS truck up the steep slope to safety.

"I can try. I can try. I can try!" Melvin recites to himself as he pushes Rita over the top to solid ground just as his braggart buddies race back to the scene.

"Melvin," honks Pete. "You did it. You roared. You soared. You really splashed."

"I know," says Melvin.

And with that modest admission, our risk-averse hero safely escorts little Rita slowly home.

With a bit of humorous borrowing from Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and The Little Engine That Could, in his Melvin Might? (Trucktown), author Jon Scieszka and his road crew of illustrators, David Shannon, Loren Long, and David Gordon, have extended their Trucktown series with the tale of Melvin, a circumspect but altruistic cement truck who risks all for a friend. As in the other books, the anthropomorphic vehicles are energetic, earnest, and full of personality, but this story has the added bonus of introducing Melvin the thinking man's cement mixer to Scieszka's readers.

Other "smashing" titles in the Jon Scieszka's Trucktown series include Who's That Truck? (Jon Scieszka's Trucktown), What a Wreck! (Jon Scieszka's Trucktown), Smash! Crash! (Jon Scieszka's Trucktown), and Meet Jack Truck! (Jon Scieszka's Trucktown).