Gus’s Garage by Leo Timmers, a children’s author from Belgium, is a bright, bold and colourful rhyming picture book that children will adore.
Lots of children’s picture books feature animals and Gus’s Garage is no different. Gus is a pig, a pig that owns a garage. Gus is also a hoarder, collecting and filling his garage with all sorts of seemingly useless bits and bobs.
But is having a garage full of “junk” or “bits and bobs” a bad thing? When Gus’s friend Rico the Rhino pays him a visit he brings along his scooter, but the seat is just too small for him making it a rather uncomfortable ride. Gus has a look through some of his collected things and uses some of his bits and bobs to create a larger seat. Once finished, Rico is much more comfortable. Word gets around and leads to his other animal friends, one by one, coming along with their own unique problems. Gus helps solve all the problems with ingenious creations using his collected junk. Nothing seems too difficult and no job too big.
He solves all sorts of different problems. Rico the Rhino has a larger and more comfortable seat, making riding his scooter much more comfortable. Gina the Giraffe, with her open top car, keeps getting a very cold neck so Gus creates a furnace powered tube to deliver warm air and keep her warm. Walter the Walrus is very hot in the sun, Gus ingeniously adds a bath that has extended pedals so Walter can still drive while soaking in water. Miss P the Penguin also has a heat problem and needs to cool down, so Gus installs a fridge to keep her cool. Henry the Hare has a need for speed and needs his truck to be faster, so Gus fits a rocket blaster trombone.
At the end of the day most of Gus’s bits and bobs have been used and his garage a lot less cluttered. He has just enough pieces left to fashion himself a pedal powered shower, complete with water, soap and shampoo to clean himself after a long and busy day of helping his friends.
Gus’s Garage is an excellent picture book about friendship, helping others and even recycling with simple rhyming text and has been beautifully illustrated with detailed, colourful images. It is an excellent easy to read story about helping others and recycling old things. In this day and age where so much is thrown away and nothing is repaired, Gus’s Garage shows how the things we would automatically throw away can be repurposed, creating new things and saving things from going to landfill.
This is an excellent children’s story where the beautifully detailed images tell their own story whilst the rhyming text make it a fun and entertaining read. We all loved it.
Rating: 5/5
RRP: £10.99 (hardback) / £6.99 (paperback/Kindle)
Available to buy from Amazon here.
