The Diggers

...actually my 6 & 8 year olds don't mind it at all either! My 3 year old is also 'reading' this book after just 2 readings by my husband and i...came on here to buy it for him! The pictures are great although the one shown with the shovel is different than the one we took out from the library with a big yellow digger bucket with the words 'the diggers' on it! love all these old classics and since haven't found the old one can't compare, but we just took 5 train books out of the library and this is the favorite of our family! AND being an engineer myself love that it shows the process of how they would build the railroad!!! def. would recommend this book to anyone with kids who like trains, trucks, diggers or digging to china!

This is an updated edition with new man-and-machine oil painting illustrations. This is not your Garth Williams little ducks and sheep picture book! The story here is almost weird -- it's much more surreal and asymmetrical than Margaret Wise Brown's usual fare. There's no regular rhyme scheme, there's no cyclical story, and nothing really works out in the end. *I* like this, and found the kind of tangential expansiveness interesting and cool. But fans of _The Runaway Bunny_ and _Goodnight Moon_ and that kind of thing might find themselves out of their comfort zone. The illustrations are VERY cool though, and a big steam shovel digs all the way under a mountain. Good for kids who like construction machines! All in all, I think it's a beautiful, imaginative book that prompts my child to think in a different way than the usual "wrapped up in a bow" story does.

My daughter got this for her 2nd birthday 2 years ago, and she adores it. I am a huge Daniel Kirk fan, and the illustrations are outstanding. It is so refreshing to see brilliantly done oil paintings in a children's book (while most of them are cartoons, computer-generated, or pale watercolor). I am not much of a Margaret Wise Brown fan, but the rhythmic prose was catchy, and a joy to read. It was and remains one of my daughter's favorite books.

What could be better for a boy of 2 1/2? After three days with this book my son was actually reciting pages of it to me. And the lyricism pervasive in all of Wise's books makes it a pleasure to read and to hear.

A great story about an excavator. Has lots of rhyme