Part of the Wheels at Work series, Ontario children’s author and illustrator Don Kilby’s latest two titles introduce the daily activities of hardworking trucks, buses, emergency vehicles, combines, tractors, sprayers, and more. Young readers are invited to use their powers of observation to understand the role of these vehicles in both city and country life.

In the City begins at dawn with a garbage truck making its rounds. Throughout the book, each truck is identified in bold print in the descriptive paragraph that accompanies its double-paged illustration. When two trucks are shown, a print label appears in the illustration to avoid confusion. Kilby’s narrative is friendly and approachable, with just the right amount of information for the targeted age group.

But it’s his artwork that is worthy of special note. Rendered in acrylic, his illustrations are vibrant and detailed, yet maintain a warm, painterly charm. This is a pleasant change from the sharp slickness of similar books that utilize colour photographs. Kilby presents a wonderful array of angles, vantage points, and perspectives that capture the confining nature of the city, but still manage to display each vehicle from its most exciting angle. The book concludes with a lonely streetsweeper working hard in the middle of the night – a nice way to frame readers’ daily experience of these big machines.

The same format is in place for the companion title, In the Country, except Kilby shows the vehicles in wide-open country vistas that emphasize their size and function. He stresses the vital roles the wheels play in the lives of farmers, transporting livestock and their feed across distances, or drilling wells for country homes. This is especially useful for urban readers who may never see any of these vehicles firsthand.

An excellent choice as a beginning non-fiction resource or to simply satisfy preschoolers’ fascination with these monster vehicles, the Wheels at Work series is definitely on the right track.