When Daddy's Truck Picks Me Up

This simple story of a boy waiting for his dad to pick him up from school is brilliantly brought to life. Hunter’s text has an accelerating beat that matches both the boy’s mounting excitement and the wheels of the father’s truck as he drives his rig from dawn across mountains, through tunnels and over bridges to make it back home to the city. Thompson’s illustrations, created with the same exuberance that the boy paints his dad’s smile (and using some of the same resources – watercolour, pen, charcoal, and, I think, wax crayon) not only balance the intimacy of the boy’s day at school with the wide open spaces through which his dad’s truck speeds, but bring out the longing of separation that is the motor of the book’s excitement. We don’t need to be told that it’s a long time since father and son have seen one another. Curiously, for a book whose creators live in England, this is a book first published in the United States, and its landscapes, trucks and cars evoke the vastness of that country rather than our own congested islands. But it doesn’t matter. Rather, it adds a heroic dimension to a story in which a big red truck is the vehicle of masculine tenderness.