EVERY children's book should be infused with emotion, starting with a sense of wonder. For me, the first great book of my childhood was "The Story of Babar," by Jean de Brunhoff, published in the United States in 1933. When I was 5, a year before Pearl Harbor, my mother showed me the book at the public library in my Brooklyn neighborhood. She told me decades later that when she saw the look on my face, she borrowed Babar and took us both home. We would borrow it, and its successors, many more times. The book has stayed with me all my life. Before I could decode the letters and words, I could follow the story through the drawings: the little elephant in the jungle, the killing of his mother by a gun-toting hunter, his wandering away from home with a broken heart and finding his way to a marvelous city. My mother called it Paris. Soon he met the Old Lady. He went to a tailor and chose a green suit, and soon he was learning to read. I read that first Babar book over and over again. The tale didn't make me into a colonialist (as later critics said it could). But ever since, I've hated guns and loved Paris. Reading these three excellent new picture books about New York City, "Balloons Over Broadway" "The Carpenter's Gift" and "Subway Story," I've tried to become a boy again, for just a little while; to read them with the innocent eyes of a child just learning to name the world. Impossible, of course. Among many reasons, I first read "Babar" in a world without television. No musical score told me what to feel. No laugh track urged me to giggle. When I opened "Babar," there were no spoken words at all, except those whispered by my mother, words from the pages of the book. Part of my growing sense of wonder surely rose from making those letters into spoken words. By myself. I do hope that many children open the pages of these books and feel something. I suspect that the emotions of New York children will not be the same as those who have never walked the streets of Manhattan. New Yorkers (and their parents) almost certainly will think: I didn't know that. But for those who live elsewhere, it might be: I wish I could go there. In "Balloons Over Broadway," Melissa Sweet tells the tale of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade through the life and career of a German immigrant named Tony Sarg, who moved to New York in 1915. Sarg was a gifted draftsman and a fine illustrator and cartoonist who was also passionate about toys and puppets. "He once said he became a marionette man when he was only 6 years old." His marionettes would eventually become essential to his American life and to the parade itself. Sweet's brilliant combination of collage, design, illustration and text gives "Balloons Over Broadway" an amazing richness. Children who can read will learn from written details, footnotes, instructions from Sarg himself. Younger children should be dazzled by the visual excitement of each spread. For parents and teachers, there is a bibliography and a note from the author that can help explain Sarg. None will ever see the parade in the same way. "The Carpenter's Gift" is more conventional in design and text, but it also tells a good story. The year is 1931, one of the worst of the Great Depression. A boy named Henry, who lives about an hour from New York City, joins his father in chopping some spruce trees and then taking them to sell in the big city. They travel in a borrowed truck, the boy filled with anticipation, since he has never before been in the city. They find their way to the site of the emerging Rockefeller Center. Some kind construction workers help them unload the trees. Father and son sell many trees, but not all, and decide to give them to the workers in gratitude for their help. The workers decorate the tallest tree, the first in Rockefeller Center, and when Henry goes home with his father, after making a wish for them to live in a warm house, he carries a pine cone with him. The following morning, he is awoken by car horns. The workers, touched by the father and son, have shown up, and then. ... Well, they return the kindness. Because this is a book about kindness, decency and memory, I'd rather not spoil the final movement. I LOVE the first sentence of "Subway Story" by Julia Sarcone-Roach, a Brooklyn-based author and illustrator: "When Jessie was born in St. Louis, Missouri, she weighed 75,122 pounds and was 51 and a half feet long." Obviously, the tale will be an exercise in the anthropomorphic. Ah, well: so, was "Babar." Jessie, the subway car, appears in the first spread, racing on elevated tracks from sunlight to deep blue night. We see her reacting to her passengers, to other trains, and crossing through tunnels under the East River. Time passes. Jessie is given new parts as old ones break down. Among other changes, she gets a paint job from the graffiti artists of the '60s and '70s. She works and she works and she works. But like most New Yorkers, she eventually starts running out of youthful energy. She is placed on furlough in the summertime, since she cannot supply enough air-conditioning, and the furlough becomes permanent. Sarcone-Roach guides us to Jessie's final destination with energy, style and charm. Only a subway rider (as the author most definitely is) could have imagined this book, and given us such a sustained sense of wonder. I hope many kids will spend some solitary time with each of these books. And maybe try "Babar" too. Pete Hamill, the author of more than 20 books, is a distinguished writer in residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University.

At Macy's department store, marionette maker Tony Sarg started inside and worked his way out. He designed mechanical storybook figures for Macy's window displays before inventing the giant balloon characters that would become the signature feature of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Sweet's whimsical mixed-media collages, embellished with little dolls she made herself out of odds and ends, reinforce the theme that, for Sarg, work was play. He loved his job just as much as the cheering crowds loved his balloons (one of Sweet's watercolor illustrations shows open-mouthed children fairly dancing with delight). Sweet runs through the various problems Sarg had to solve before his behemoths could fly: "He would have to make much larger puppets in order for them to be seen in the parade. And how could he make them strong enough to hold up in bad weather yet light enough to move up and down the streets?" (He hired a blimp manufacturer in Ohio to create his designs out of rubberized silk.) His biggest concern was that the balloons seem animated, that they move like puppets, so he came up with the idea to control them like marionettes, only with the control strings on the bottom instead of the top. Thus, thanks to Tony Sarg, SpongeBob soars. An author's note and source list are appended. christine m. heppermann (c) Copyright 2011. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

*Starred Review* This is a picture book about the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, but that's on the macro level. There is also a wonderfully personal story here as Sweet introduces Tony Sarg, a boy who loved puppets and grew up to create them for one of the world's most famous parades. As a kid, young Sarg was a master manipulator, making marionettes and inventing pulleys that could feed the chickens in his family's coop. As an adult, he brought his marionettes to Broadway, where R. H. Macy saw them and asked Sarg to provide designs for his store's windows and then, later, to create puppets for a holiday parade. Right from the start, in 1924, the Thanksgiving Day Parade was a success, and Sarg's ideas became more expansive, literally, as he designed animals part puppet, part balloon that eventually became the fabulous creatures we know today. Through careful explanation and fantastic art, Sweet explains step-by-step how the balloons were shaped and evolved. The pictures, a mix of collage and watercolors, are as exciting as the parade itself and are presented in an innovative design that uses an array of typefaces, reproductions of old newspaper articles, silhouettes, and the occasional comic-strip format. The only thing that could have made this better is if Sweet had used her stand-out collage techniques for the balloon representations, instead of watercolor artwork. But that's a quibble. What she has done is make a joyous piece of nonfiction that informs and delights in equal parts.--Cooper, Ilene Copyright 2010 Booklist

This bright, brimming picture biography commemorates Tony Sarg, a brilliant, self-taught artist whose innovative helium balloons delighted legions of Macy's parade watchers from 1928 on.Sweet sketches Sarg's career as a puppeteer and marionette-maker. Moving from London to New York City, where his marionettes performed on Broadway, Sarg engineered mechanical storybook characters for Macy's "Wondertown" holiday windows. In 1924, he created floats and costumes for the first Macy's parade, which celebrated both immigrant and American holiday traditions. When the annual parade's lions and tigers (borrowed from the Central Park Zoo) frightened children, Macy's commissioned Sarg to replace them. Ever innovative, Sarg eventually utilized rubberized silk and helium to create larger, lighter balloons that could be controlled from below. Sweet's charming mixed-media layouts form a playful bridge between her creative process and Sarg's. She fashioned whimsical toys from painted blocks, buttons and fabric, combining them in photo-collages with old books, cut paper, imagined sketches for Sarg's projects, watercolor images of parade scenes and much more. Endpapers inform and delight, too, with excerpts from a 1929 book about Sarg's marionettes and a front-page parade invitation in the 1933New York Times. Backmatter is also a collage of treats, with an author's note appending further biographical details and comments about the art.This clever marriage of information and illustration soars high. (bibliography of adult sources, quote sources, acknowledgements, period photo)(Picture book/biography. 4-8)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

K-Gr 3-The Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade is a holiday tradition. But where did those big balloons begin? With puppeteer Tony Sarg, of course! The informative, enthusiastic text of Sweet's Robert F. Siebert Medal picture-book biography (Houghton Mifflin, 2011) tells a little about Sarg's life and his career in puppetry, adding a few quirky details sure to amuse listeners. Then it gets into the details of his part in the parade, and the evolution of creativity that led to the balloons we see today. John McDonough reads the text in a measured, clear manner-rather like the steady, rhythmic march of a band-giving listeners plenty of opportunity to explore Sweet's inspired multimedia illustrations. The end notes give additional information on this fascinating but little-known character from history. A delightful example of good nonfiction that should capture the interest of young and old alike.-Teresa Bateman, Brigadoon Elementary, Federal Way, WA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Tony Sarg (1880-1942, "rhymes with aargh!"), the man who invented the giant balloons of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, has found a worthy biographer in Caldecott Honoree Sweet (A River of Words). With lighthearted watercolors, fanciful scrapbooking, and collaged typography, Sweet shows how Sarg, a self-taught immigrant, combined an indomitable curiosity with an engineer's know-how and a forever-young imagination. The story walks readers through each stage of Sarg's development as a master of puppetry-his childhood fascination with mechanics and marionettes, his first big break as a developer of window displays for Macy's, and his early earthbound parade creations (essentially air-filled rubber bags that were steered down the street). And then comes the light-bulb moment: "With a marionette, the controls are above and the puppet hangs down..." writes Sweet. "But what if the controls were below and the puppet could rise up?" The rush that comes from inspiration, the cliffhanger moments of creation, the sheer joy of building something and watching it delight the multitudes-Sweet captures it all in what is truly a story for all ages. Ages 4-8. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.