Benn Lyon

This companion to Trucks Roll! (rev. 7/07) and Planes Fly! (rev. 9/13) introduces young children to a veritable fleet of sea vehicles: tugboats, sailboats, mail boats, canoes, steamboats, gondolas, bilibilis, and many more. Pitched to young children, the buoyant (get it?) rhymes are both factually informative—packed as they are with maritime terminology—and giddily unpredictable. Some lines play up poetic imagery, while others are child-pleasingly jocular (“A lookout’s on the poop deck. / Controls are on the bridge. / The bathroom’s called the head. / The galley holds the fridge”) or mind-expanding (“When seaplanes land / they land on floats, / so on the water / seaplanes are boats”). The digital, sun-bathed illustrations, with the look of vintage European travel posters, aren’t limited to the seaside: there’s a city-park scene with remote-control boats on a pond, along with a bathtub scene, a ship-in-a-bottle scene, and one of a swimming pool