View source for Nee Nah! Nee Nah! To the Rescue: Press the tabs, hear the sounds (Sound of the City) by Carles Ballasteros

{{infobox
|title=Nee Nah! Nee Nah! To the Rescue: Press the tabs, hear the sounds (Sound of the City)
|author=Carles Ballasteros
|reviewer=Sue Magee
|genre=For Sharing
|summary=It might look like a simple board book with lots of illustrations of boys' toys, but there's lots more to this book than meets the eye - for boys and girls.
|rating=4
|buy=Yes
|borrow=Yes
|pages=12 
|publisher=QED Publishing
|date=July 2107
|isbn=978-1784937423
|website=
|video=
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1784937428</amazonuk>
}}

The cover of this book might tell you all that you need to know if you're buying a book for a boy who loves noisy vehicles, but if you dismiss it on those grounds you might be making a mistake.  Let me tell you a bit about it.  It's a substantially-built board book with suitably rounded corners for when it's used as a missile and it has tabs which take you to the pages for the vehicles we're going to be looking at.  There's a helicopter, a police car, a fire engine and an ambulance.  For a lot of books for the youngest children that would be it - and a lot of children would enjoy looking at the pictures.  But - there's more...

If you press the tab (actually, giving it a squeeze worked best for me and there's less likely to be long-term damage to the book) you'll hear the sound that the particular rescue vehicle makes.  This might fill you with dread, but despite the fact that the sounds are ''clear'' they're not overly ''loud''.  There's a sound for each of the vehicles and then a page showing all the vehicles and you get to pick out which vehicles is making the sound, so a good test of audio and visual memory.  The sounds are powered three batteries (0% mercury button battery #LR1130) which is housed in a substantial casing on the back of the book.  To remove or change the batteries you need a tiny screw driver so they're not going to be removed 'by accident' any time soon.  There's also a discretely positioned on/off switch which might prevent your being woken at five on a summer's morning, wondering if you're suffering from PTSD.

That's the mechanics of the book.  They work well.  Now to the content.  Half of the vehicles are driven by women.  Paula is racing away in the police car and Anna has arrived in the ambulance.  HURRAH!  I don't want boys or girls growing up believing that some jobs are for boys are some are for girls.  Also brilliant is that there's ethnic diversity: of the five people portrayed, three are white and two are black.  HURRAH again.

I've only one minor quibble about the book and that's that I couldn't understand why there was a dog in the fire engine, particularly as he was hanging out of the window rather dangerously, but that's me being very picky.  I'd like to thank the publishers for sending a copy to the Bookbag.

If you'd like to know more about what happens in the town (and the countryside) we can recommend [[Town and Country (Turnaround Book) by Craig Shuttlewood]]. Vehicle-loving children will love [[Following the Tractor by Susan Steggall]].  For more on vehicles for the youngest children, have a look at [[Things That Go (Baby Can See) by Leonie Lagarde]].

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