Skip to main content

BALLOONS OVER BROADWAY



BIBLIOGRAPHY
Sweet, Melissa. 2011. Balloons over broadway New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Books for Children. ISBN 978-0-547-19945-0

PLOT SUMMARY
How did one boy get out of chores forever? Invent a chicken-feeding system, of course! From the moment he feeds the chickens to the arrival of Garfield in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, kids will love this biography of Tony Sarg. In BALLOONS OVER BROADWAY, Melissa Sweet details his journey from farm boy to puppeteer to balloon master. As the creator of the famed Macy’s floating balloons, Sweet explains both the life of Tony Sarg and his ingenious method for bringing puppets to life. Along the way, kids will love Sweet’s illustrations of Sarg’s ideas, especially the upside-down marionettes which grace the final pages of the book.

CRITICAL ANALYSIS
In BALLOONS OVER BROADWAY, Melissa Sweet triumphantly serves as both author and illustrator. Since BALLOONS OVER BROADWAY is a biography, it is organized chronologically over the course of Tony Sarg’s life. Each period of his life builds upon the previous years to show the progression of his expertise in the field of puppeteering. Sweet launces the book with Tony Sarg’s enduring understanding of the world:

“Every little movement has a meaning of its own.” Tony Sarg

Her writing and illustrations mimic this understanding. As an author, she describes Tony Sarg’s life in child-friendly terms, yet introduces higher-level vocabulary, like pulley, with the support of interesting visuals. For instance, the drawing of Sarg’s chicken-feeding system shows not only the pulley system, but labels the steps correctly. The vocabulary is further supported by the illustration of six-year-old Tony feeding the chickens from the comfort of his bed. Similar drawings, complete with arrows and labels, serve as reference aids at multiple points throughout the book. 

As an illustrator, Melissa Sweet features gouache watercolors, collage and mixed media. She wastes no space, even using the endpapers. The front papers describe Sarg’s toy collection and the back papers are a reprint of the New York Times balloon ad from November 30, 1933. Kids will especially love the mixed media, which includes puppets, blocks, buttons and pulleys. It is a feast for the eyes! Because there are so many facets of artistic design, this book lends itself to in-depth study of nonfiction text features, like photographs, caption, drawings and labels. Toward the end of the book, Sweet illustrates the parade balloons on a grand scale. The balloons fill the pages and text is minimized. This balance lends support to the idea of scale for the balloons, allowing them to fill the space and tell their own story. There is even a treat for the reader when the first balloon is illustrated--you need to reorient the book for vertical viewing. Kids will love this unusual use of space in a picture book!

There is an Author’s Note at the end of the book. Replete with playfulness, it is different from the typical author’s note and kids are more likely to read it as a result. Sweet continues to toy with space and even includes her thought process about creating the artwork for the book. She also includes a bibliography of sources used to research the story. The bibliography and quotations lend credibility to the accuracy of the story and give the reader a jumping off point to learn more.

BALLOONS OVER BROADWAY captures the imagination of Tony Sarg and inspires imagination in the reader. Sweet strikes the right balance between text and art, supporting complex ideas with striking visuals. Kids will want to break out the craft supplies and begin creating puppets!

REVIEW EXCERPT(S)

PUBLISHER WEEKLY: “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).”

SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL: 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.

CONNECTIONS
  • Read this book before Thanksgiving and then have kids watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade Thanksgiving morning. They’ll be able to view the strings which attach to the balloon puppets and are controlled by balloon handlers.
  • Guide students through a picture walk of the book. The illustrations serve as stories themselves. Challenge students to find all the elements of a page’s illustration, from the pictures supporting the story to the graphic elements to the drawings. Examine all the layers.
  • Build a puppet! This book begs students to build their own puppets using child-friendly project ideas like a Paper Bag Rod Puppet or Shadow Puppets.
  • 2012 Robert F. Sibert Medal Winner
  • 2012 NCTE Orbis Pictus Award

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

FOREST HAS A SONG

Vanderwater, Amy FOREST HAS A SONG. Ill. by Robbin Gourley. ISBN 9780618843497. CRITICAL ANALYSIS Amy Vanderwater brings us a hearty collection of 26 poems. They weave together the story of one girl’s experience in the forest over the course of a year. The poems begin with spring and then merge into summer, with poems like APRIL WAKING and PUFF. Fall and winter poems wrap up this collection, including MAPLES IN OCTOBER and COLORFUL ACTOR. Each poem brings the reader into the forest, so we enjoy the romp through each season with the girl. VanDerwater’s use of language leads the reader to experience the sounds and rhythms of the forest. By employing italics, she brings the forest’s perspective in some poems, which serves as a wonderful point-of-view experience for the young reader. The collection is superbly  illustrated by Robbin Gourley. At its best, illustrations tell a visual story which parallels and enhances the textual message. Gourley does this brilli...
2 comments
Read more

TRICKS

Hopkins, Ellen. 2009. TRICKS. New York: Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing Division. ISBN 9781416950073.  TRICKS takes us on the journey of five teens descending into the seedy world of teen prostitution. Eden is the daughter of a preacher. Her mother sees demons in Eden’s first brush with love and sends her off to prevent whorish behavior, which Eden ironically learns at the ranch where she’s sent. Cody deals with the devastating loss of his stepfather to cancer by spiraling downward into the world of gambling. He soon will sell anything to pay his increasing debts. Seth is looking for love and acceptance of his homosexual identity, only to be accused by his father of being a deviant; then, he becomes one. Whitney desperately seeks love from her socialite mother and successful father. She wants to be seen and noticed by them, but will accept the love of a stranger to replace her familial invisibility. And finally Ginger, who is tricked for the fi...
3 comments
Read more

THE CROSSOVER

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alexander, Kwame. 2014. CROSSOVER. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN 9780544107717. CRITICAL ANALYSIS I had the opportunity to listen to Kwame Alexander speak at the Texas Library Association conference in San Antonio in April 2014. He spoke on the impetus for Crossover: to write a verse novel for boys. And not just any boy, but the sports-loving, poetry-hating, I-don’t-go-to-the-library sort of boy. I was completely intrigued and knew I had to read this book, because he’s absolutely correct in noticing the gap in this genre’s niche: most verse novels are written to appeal to girls, and boys who do read verse novels are already vested in their own reading identity. But could he pull it off? I will freely admit, although I loved the cover, that I was a bit skeptical of the goal. I’m a middle school librarian, so I really wanted to meet the verse novel which could hook my sports-loving, poetry-hating, I-don’t-go-to-the-library boys into reading i...
1 comment
Read more