An Usborne Beginners reader on the job most five year olds already have questions about. Short sentences, large type, and a mix of press photographs and cartoon panels, so a page of real information reads like something worth turning to.

At the station, on pages 8 and 9, runs the crew through a full day in six panels: arriving for work and reporting to the leader, checking the engines and hoses, meals cooked in the station kitchen, night duty beds, then the alarm and the lights coming on, all set beside a photograph of a red engine already moving. Forest fires fills its page with orange and puts a line of firefighters against a wall of flame, next to a yellow water bomber releasing its load over smoking pines, with the text explaining that helicopters carry buckets and planes scoop from lakes and the sea. Tall platforms, on pages 12 and 13, takes a platform engine apart: four legs coming down to steady it, a lever to raise the arm, and a photograph of two firefighters riding the platform up in breathing masks to spray water down onto a burning building.

Thirty two pages at about 6.1 by 8.3 inches, measured at Lexile 570L, written by Katie Daynes and illustrated by Christyan Fox. The easiest reading level in the series, so it suits a child a little earlier than the rest.

Paperback, 32 pages, 6.1 by 8.3 in (156 by 210 mm), from the Usborne Beginners series. Usborne Publishing Ltd., May 2024. ISBN-13 9781835402429. Publisher age guidance: 4 and up.

The same series covers a different subject in Beginners: Weather. For a younger reader on the same trucks, Peek Inside How a Fire Truck Works opens flaps instead of pages, and Lights and Sounds Emergency Vehicles adds the sirens.

Two more Usborne Beginners readers joined the shelf: Beginners: Trees, on how a tree feeds itself and who lives in one, and Beginners: Storms and Hurricanes, on lightning, dust storms and gales.