about the book
A yellow-helmeted lad rides his red bike down his neighborhood’s twisted street when he spies an ice cream truck. That’s always a good thing.
But this ice cream truck broke down right in the middle of the road…and now a mail truck is stuck behind it.
And a truck filled with hay is stuck behind the mail truck.
And a big yellow crane truck is stuck behind the hay wagon.
On and on, twenty trucks pile up, each stuck after the other… and no one is going anywhere!
All the drivers and the neighbors offer suggestions, but the little lad comes up with the very best idea of all. It takes some persistence, but finally he convinces the crowd just how to get all the trucks moving, including the ice cream truck!
about the author
Mark Lee is a war correspondent, an adult novelist, a playwright, and a poet. He was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and grew up with a terrible stutter. Because of this, Mark became a huge reader, and fiction was his escape.
He attended Yale University and, after graduating in 1973, Mark moved to New York City where he worked as a security guard, taxi driver, and language teacher. All along he kept writing. Eventually his poetry and articles were published in several journals
In 1980 Mark became a foreign correspondent in Africa—and was almost killed while reporting in war-torn Uganda. When he came home to the U.S., he found that he couldn’t write poetry anymore. Instead he wrote adult novels and plays. In 2000, Mark again took on a foreign assignment to cover the civil war in East Timor. He returned to write war-related essays and short stories.
Mark currently lives in southern California. Since he and his wife do now allow television shows to influence their two young children, they read to the kids a lot. This inspired Mark to write his first picture book and that gave him a chance to write poetry once again!
Sources:
Author biography: Wikipedia
Author interview: Allison’s Book Bag
about the illustrator
Kurt Cyrus was born in 1954. Kurt has a great imagination. One of his first drawings was a picture of a dog riding a giant fish on wheels, which was being pulled by harnessed sardines. He also drew a lot of trains. Even now, a half century later, he still draws a lot of trains. Kurt loves trains!
Though he did a lot of sketching as a child, Kurt wasn’t sure what he was going to do with his life. He tried all sorts of things, and nothing seemed to work out He dropped out of forestry school and dabbled in picking fruit, building solar panels, driving forklifts, operating a rock drill, framing pictures, mixing concrete, and working as a respiratory therapist in a hospital.
He even went to the Art Center School where he roomed with famed cartoonist Paul Chadwick and renowned fine artist Thomas Kinkade.
Illustrating children’s books didn’t even occur to him, but his buddy Lane Smith was passionate about children’s literature. Slowly, Kurt caught the bug, too. Though Kurt dropped out of art school, he only ever wanted to illustrate children’s books.
Finally after about thirty years, he got the call…the manuscript he wrote and illustrated, Tangle Town, was being published! Since then Kurt has published twelve more picture books that he both wrote and illustrated. He has also illustrated books for many other writers.
Kurt currently lives in Cottage Grove, Oregon, with his partner Linnea and their dog.
Sources:
Illustrator website
Illustrator interview: Adventures Underground
Also by Kurt Cyrus:
Big Rig Bugs. Walker Books for Young Readers. 2010.
Hibernation Station by Michelle Meadows. Simon & Schuster. 2010.
World Builder by Ann Whitford Paul. Simon & Schuster. 2009.
Pest Fest by Julia Durango. Simon & Schuster. 2007.
Mammoths on the Move. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 2006.
The Bones of Fred McFee by Eve Bunting. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 2002.
Sixteen Cows by Lisa Wheeler. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 2002.
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Follow a young boy in a hard hat as he hammers, shovels mortar, and works very hard. He begins to construct his project with twenty-six letters. Then he piles the constructed words into blocks of sentence towers. The sentences towers are worked into paragraph villages and the paragraph villages are stacked into chapter cities. In the end, what has he constructed? You’ll never guess!