Billions of Bricks

Locations
Call Number: E CYR, Kids Book / Picture Books / Concepts / Numbers
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Malletts Creek Branch, Pittsfield Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown Kids Books 4-week checkout	E CYR	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Malletts Kids Books 4-week checkout	Kids Book / Picture Books / Concepts / Numbers	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Pittsfield Kids Books 4-week checkout	Kids Book / Picture Books / Concepts / Numbers	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Traverwood Kids Books 4-week checkout	Kids Book / Picture Books / Concepts / Numbers	4-week checkout	Due 05-22-2024
Westgate Kids Books 4-week checkout	Kids Book / Picture Books / Concepts / Numbers	4-week checkout	Due 04-30-2024

A counting book that leads readers through the day in the life of a construction worker building with bricks.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

School Library Journal Review
Booklist Review
Publishers Weekly Review
Summary / Annotation
Fiction Profile
Author Notes

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

constructive counting submitted by FordAlpha on August 30, 2019, 9:46pm Something about this counting book struck me as weird and spooky. Maybe it's because all of the people, despite their diversity of age, race, and sex, are identically dressed? They seem sort of like automata. Why are they building such a grand array of brick buildings all at once? Oh, well. The rhyming text is vigorous, and different font sizes are used to cue emphasis. It's an original, unique counting book in that it doesn't just count up by ones, or major milestone numbers, but skip-counts and counts by grouping in different ways as the number of bricks piles up very high indeed. The illustrations are vivid but get kind of monotonous after a while: all that brick red.

Nice Textual Flow submitted by Meginator on August 31, 2019, 8:59pm Calling this a counting book is a bit of a misnomer: though the first few pages do revolve around an increasing count of bricks, the progression isn’t linear and is interspersed with pages about brick-making and building. Aside from the misleading subtitle, the book is pretty good and an excellent choice to read aloud. The cadence and rhymes flow very naturally, with repetition in the counting patterns and sound effects, though I wasn’t prepared for the final joke and it ended up falling a bit flat. The illustrations are nicely varied, showing the different stages of brickmaking (though I’m not sure how I feel about the number of children depicted doing hard physical labor here) and showcasing some fabulous architecture; sharp-eyed readers will have fun trying to figure out how the bricks come together to make some of the shapes found in the buildings. I wouldn’t necessarily return to this book, but it was fun enough for a single read-through and readers interested in buildings will probably get a lot out of it.