Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #153824 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 32 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780618554591
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From School Library Journal
PreSchool-Grade 1–Snug in her bed, a youngster hears a distant siren and dreams of firefighters' brave escapades. With the refrain, What happened was this, she relates several imaginary adventures. The squad saves a castle full of princesses after a dragon blows on his food and starts a fire, cools a woman's mouth after she eats a hot pepper, and rescues a boy who bounces off his bed and lands on Pluto. The girl also concocts personalities for the diverse crew members, down to their favorite foods. Finally, the firefighters come to ask for her help in extinguishing the stars from the night sky. Slater's rhythmic, sometimes rhyming prose captures the child's enthusiasm, though unusual phrasings may trip up unpracticed readers while sharing the book aloud. Ceccoli's dreamy, luminescent paintings perfectly suit the story. The heroes' round faces are kind and lovable. Observant youngsters will note that the firefighters' yellow and black boots appear as yellow and blue, but this minor inconsistency will give way to delight at the image of the dragon at the table with fork and knife in hand, or the view up through city buildings of an exuberant boy tumbling through the air. A perfect choice for bedtime reading.–Jayne Damron, Farmington Community Library, MI
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

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Customer Reviews

Not your typical firefighters book
This is a blessed relief from the run of the mill firefighters book. The text is magical, whimsical and dreamy, and the illustrations are just as outstanding. It reads like the dream of a particularly imaginative kid, which makes it fun to read as a parent. You most definately will not groan when your tot wants you to read it again. And again. And again. You know what I mean. If your kid likes firefighters, this is a must have.

We are on the thousandth read of this book...
...and you would think that I'd be bored from reading it over and over, but somehow I am not.

This book isn't really about firefighters, it's about a young girl's imagination and what she imagines the firefighters do. She hears the fire engine's siren outside her window at night, and she spins these tales that are imbued with a dreamlike quality, almost as if she is drifting off to sleep. They douse a fire at a medieval castle inadvertently ignited by a dragon; he has stopped in for dinner and blown on his potatoes to cool them with his fire breath. They head to a fire all the way in Mexico that started when a woman eats a chili pepper in her garden that is so hot, embers shoot out from her mouth. The ladder crew retrieves a young boy who has bounced so high on his bed that he launched himself all the way to Pluto. He must return home because he doesn't have the right gear on, that is, a spacesuit and mittens. Of course, because it falls to the girl's imagination to name them, they don't have names like Joe and Dave. They have the names Penelope, Almondine, King and, the one conventional name, Bruce.

Imagine several four or five-year olds explaining to you their most fanciful ideas of what firefighters do and this is a composite of those stories. Every detail about the firefighters envisioned by the narrator is so completely true to a young child's imagination, thought-process and rationale, right down to the naming of the firefighters and the non sequitur enumerating of what foods they like to eat. Only a kid would include a list of foods each firefighter enjoys. It's actually quite hilarious. My two-year old daughter most enjoys doing her impression of the father of the boy who bounced to Pluto with her gruff grown-up voice yelling "Come down here right now, it's time for bed." Only a ridiculous grown-up would say something so deflating and practical at a time like that.

The dreamy quality of the illustrations perfectly compliments the text. Nicoletta Ceccoli always renders the most elegant images, here as in Little Red Riding Hood and Island in the Sun.

A firefighter book for girls!
My three year old daughter is fascinated by firefighters and fire trucks but almost all of the toddler books we've seen on that topic are aimed at young boys and this book is a great alternative. It tells the story of a young girl who lives near a fire station and what she imagines/dreams the firefighters are doing when she hears their sirens at night (putting out one fire in a castle that was started by a dragon and another that was caused by a woman in mexico eating hot chili peppers) as well as silly things about the firefighters themselves. A great book with a wonderful dreamlike quality and fantastic illustrations.