Updated January 28, 2026 at 10:20 AM CST
Jon Klassen didn't want the truck to move. That's the one thing the children's book author and illustrator knew when he started working on his latest book, Your Truck. A part of that had to do with his self-awareness of his own style.
"I like my guys to look awkwardly still," he said in an interview. "Like they don't really know what they're doing in the book."
But part of the beauty of owning something isn't about what the thing itself can or cannot do. It's about the possibility of what you can do with the thing. Your Truck is just the first in a trilogy of board books mining that possibility. Klassen said young children are used to being told what they can do eventually, what they will be able to do later. They can't walk, yet. They can't reach up to the counter, yet. "It's all this potential," he said.
The book opens with the lines "This is your truck. It is yours to have." The truck in question is red. It's got eyes instead of headlights, which move from side to side a bit, but otherwise, the truck doesn't do much. A dog hops into the cab.
"Your truck can go fast," the book says. "I know it's not going fast right now. It is waiting for you." And then Klassen sets up the emotional tentpole of the book, by writing that when "you are ready to go," your truck can go and go and take you "as far away from here as you want."
"But not right now," Klassen writes. "Not yet."
Klassen is a veteran of children's books and knows exactly what he's doing with this line – the anticipation and excitement for the kid hearing it, and the gut punch for the person reading it. He said he was thinking a lot about why his own kids, especially his youngest, had an affinity for trucks. After all, they take you away, don't they? "And you just spin out, as a parent, to be like, 'well don't go anywhere!'" he said.
But Klassen doesn't start writing his books thinking about the metaphor, thinking about the truck symbolizing movement, voyaging and leaving home. "Kids aren't thinking that way," he said. Instead, everything circles back to the thing itself – the truck, in this case. "Just sit there with it," he said. "Don't complicate it.
"That's harder to do for me because the temptation is to think of yourself as some fancy poet and go off into meaning. But I admire the books more that don't do that and still pull it off. That's the best is when you step back after you did the thing that you thought was just about a truck, and yet you've got this lump in your throat on page seven. That's the goal."
The next two books in the Your Things series are Your Horse and Your Rock – two objects famously free of symbolism or deeper meaning. They couldn't possibly be a stand in for your hopes and dreams for a child's life. They are, after all, just things.
Copyright 2026 NPR
