Review: Machines Go to Work in the City

Machines Go to Work in the City by William Low

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



This was a good choice for a one-artist picturebook. Too often it's the writing that is difficult to pull off, so a concept book doesn't really demand the control of a narrative or poem. We get to focus on Low's representational art instead of worrying about whether he can pull off the text. Low has one of those painting styles that looks hyper-realistic from medium distance, but is really highly impressionistic and painterly up close. I liked looking at the cityscape backgrounds to see the textures of windows and different parts of trucks and big machines.

The 'perfect for little hands' tag on the front is not really true. The copy I have from Poudre Libraries is well handled and ripped many times where the pages fold out, or folded back several wrong ways before turning and folding the page back. But I don't know of any book with flaps that doesn't suffer this trauma. It's a kind of book that challenges hands. If it isn't already a board book, it should be.

The one thing I wish Low had been able to pull off would be a double use of the folding flap. If the back of the flap had somehow been used on the -next- double page spread as well as the current one it would have been ingenious!



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