Bang! Boom! Roar! A Busy Crew of Dinosaurs

by Nate Evans, Christopher Santoro, Stephanie Gwyn Brown

Overview

What's that
Bang!
Boom!
Roar!?

A busy crew of dinosaurs!
Engines fire, swing that hammer,
Cover your ears—it's quite a clamor!
But keep those eyes open wide,
Because the alphabet hides inside.
Find each letter—wait, there's more!
Big trucks, cool tools, and surprises galore!

Cool hard-hat dinosaurs jam-pack this rhyming alphabet picture book by New York Times bestselling author Nate Evans and Stephanie Gwyn Brown, brought to life by Christopher Santoro's hilarious and energetic illustrations. Kids will love looking for the hidden letters on each page and finding the visual jokes that lead to a supersilly surprise ending. Construction work may be tough, but even dinos love a little monkey business!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060879600
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	08/21/2012
Pages:	40
Sales rank:	216,088
Product dimensions:	9.40(w) x 11.10(h) x 0.20(d)
Lexile:	390L (what's this?)
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

Nate Evans wanted to be a secret agent, a firefighter, or a magician when he was a kid. But he also loved to read and write. Now he has thirty-five children's books to his credit, including the New York Times bestsellers Ponyella and The Jellybeans and the Big Dance, both cowritten with Laura Numeroff, and the series Humpty Dumpty Jr: Hardboiled Detective, an IndieBound "Inspired Recommendation for Kids." He also illustrated Laura Numeroff's 10-step Guide to Living With Your Monster, among others.

Christopher Santoro has been illustrating children's books for more than thirty years, including Grandpappy Snippy Snappies; A Pie Went By, a NEST Literary Classic; and the Dom DeLuise picture books Charlie the Caterpillar, Hansel and Gretel, The Nightingale, and King Bob's New Clothes. Christopher has been honored by the Society of Illustrators, the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the American Library Association, and The New Yorker. He lives in Key West, Florida, with two cats, Ernie and Truman, and a dog, Stuart.

Stephanie Gwyn Brown is a painter, a poet, an illustrator, a designer, an aspiring puppeteer-musician, and an award-winning experimental animator. When not tending her backyard menagerie in Los Angeles, she may be found at the Natural History Museum, in a public library, or in a classroom. Stephanie is the author of Professor Aesop's The Crow and the Pitcher.

Editorial Reviews

Dinosaurs and heavy-duty vehicles share the spotlight in this alphabetical tour of a construction site, but unlike Chris Gall's Dinotrux, this story casts the dinosaurs as a busy team of workers using the backhoes and bulldozers. Moving through the alphabet, Evans (coauthor of the Jellybeans series) and Brown (Professor Aesop's The Crow and the Pitcher) present a lively four-line rhyme that plays up each letter: "Hard hats, tool belts, heavy boots;/ Hammers hanging from their loops./ Heave and hoist! Hydraulic muscle!/ Heavy metal, high-wire hustle!" Just as the authors pack their verse with alliteration, Santoro (Grandpappy Snippy Snappies) jams each mixed-media spread with outsize comedic moments and enough details to delight construction-loving readers. Photographic elements (boulders, crates, rubble) mix with Santoro's glossy cartoon dinosaurs, who wear hard hats, orange vests, and pants that occasionally sink too low in the rear. More than 20 dinos appear throughout (Santoro labels both the creatures and the vehicles on the endpapers, using a banana and steak to distinguish herbivores and carnivores). Like their crew of dinosaurs, this team gets the job done. Ages 3–7. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

PreS-Gr 1—This picture book combines favorite topics of the preschool set (trucks, dinosaurs) with ABCs, alliteration, a graphic collage of action-packed images, winning cartoon faces, humor, and an assortment of searchable items. Following endpapers that introduce 24 dinosaur friends (meat eaters noted with a steak icon and vegetarians with a banana), the text launches into rhyming couplets in an alphabetic pattern; the dinosaurs are building a masterpiece of construction. Oh, they're loud and boisterous, but dedicated to their task. The tale may be a bit contrived, yet readers will be looking at the frenetic display of detailed images on each spread. While the "experts use their elbow grease to engineer a masterpiece," children are invited to find specific items-4 cups of coffee, 43 ripe bananas, an unwrapped red lollipop-or review dinosaurs on a "high-wire hustle," all a part of the romp that results in a finished playground. The clutter here is sometimes overwhelming, but an amazing wealth of detail will keep readers occupied for hours. From a surprised, helmeted compsognathus chomping on his sandwich to 15 favorite construction tools on the final pages, this is a combination of visual entertainment and text with a multitude of uses in most libraries.—Mary Elam, Learning Media Services, Plano ISD, TX

School Library Journal

A teeming dino crew in hard hats and safety vests create organized if frenetic chaos on a mucky construction site in this alpha-romp. The 16 full-bleed digital collages are jammed with hundreds of sharply reproduced images and photos of hand tools, heavy machinery, construction materials, litter and hidden letters, as well as flying glop of various sorts. Within them, a swarm of grimacing, toothy cartoon monsters convert a trash-filled empty lot into an urban playground. Rhymed, if not always regular, stanzas of alliterative text provide a heavy background beat: "Trample rock with this track paver. / Toss in tar! A true time-saver! / Towering torches and twisting necks. / Teetering, tottering tons of high tech!" Whether peeking out of a port-a-potty, racing lumbering earth movers or putting their "[j]umbo blubber in a wiggle" with jackhammers, the well-larded laborers are easily identifiable thanks to a labeled opening gallery (with bananas or steaks added to indicate dietary preferences). Along with the aforementioned hidden alphabet--plus dozens of other items listed at the back--the pictures are chock-full of funny side business for young eyes to pick out too. Pure pleasure for children addicted to dinos, the delights of big trucks and decoding visual jumbles. (Picture book. 5-7)

Kirkus Reviews