What’s Up Construction Truck? melds the impossible into a board book

What’s Up Construction Truck? is a board book that flies in the face of expectations. It is a board book. It is an interactive/pop-up book to an extent. It’s the smart, buildable board book that you wish that you had when you were a kid. It truly is a great time to be alive, but it didn’t start out this way. When we first received What’s Up Construction Truck? it scared me because of its implied simplicity. I just want a board book, not a puzzle that will embarrass me in front of my 12-year-old, I thought. So, I gave the book to him and let him put it together.

But before doing that I read the book and even as a book, it delivers. Matthew Reinhart is an author that creates some of the most beautiful, deceivingly complex, or simple depending on your mood, pop-up books that you’ll encounter. His books cover all areas of fandom and span all ages. What’s Up Construction Truck? is one of his younger-skewing books. It’s made even more impressive when factoring in that there’s an element on each of the board book pages that invites young readers to do something.

They might lift a flap. Sometimes they’ll pull a tab and the paver will go across the page. If you move a tab up then the front end of a loader will slowly come off of the pages. Even as a board book, if the task of putting together an actual truck, that’s made from the book is too daunting, it’s a home run.

Now, back to our puzzle-inclined 12-year-old and the construction truck, I asked him to build from the pages of What’s Up Construction Truck?. To be clear, this is not a craft book. There are no stickers that you’ll have to remove or paste anywhere. This is a book that turns into a truck and if most audiences are like ours then it can be done in just a couple of minutes.

Literally, within two minutes he followed the directions and created a physical construction truck that was made up of the pages I had just read. What sort of witchcraft is this? Actually, we have several of Reinhart’s books in the office and they’re all amazing in their individual way. Our hesitation in accepting the book when we first saw it revolved around the fact that it was being done with a board book.

Toddlers have a hit list of board books that they’d like to destroy, eat, maim, or otherwise make not usable for the next year’s crop of crawlers. What’s Up Construction Truck? is certainly on that list and depending on its state and who is in the room it’ll survive just fine.

When the book is in the truck form it is extremely durable. Even in that shape, there are pop-up elements that children can manipulate. Remember the front end that moved up when it was a book? Now that the front end is at the front of a construction truck, it still moves up. When it’s in this shape it stays in this shape. You can push the truck on the floor, toss it to a friend (not that we recommend that) or put a LEGO figure on to ‘steer’ it or put in the unlucky path of this earth mover. The fact that we could play with What’s Up Construction Truck? as an actual 3-D bulldozer was very surprising.

Would the 3-D bulldozer hold up if a five-year-old were to fall on it? No, but it’s not intended to support that much weight. It will last though, and it will last a very long time. Some kids will be able to assemble it with minimal instruction and some adults might need to view the video that step-by-step, shows you how to do it, and you can do it. The wonderment of the book happens when you read it to those young audiences and then turn the pages in that particular order to create the 3-D bulldozer. This is the kind of fun, mind-bending experience that gets kids thinking out of the box.

What’s Up Construction Truck? is by Matthew Reinhart with art by Toby Leigh and available on Abrams Appleseed, an imprint of Abrams Books.

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