Books like Balloons Over Broadway
By Melissa Sweet
Balloons Over Broadway starts with a kid rigging up gadgets in his room and ends with giant balloons floating over Manhattan. Your kid gets to watch a real tinkerer's ideas grow into something whole crowds look up and cheer for. Here are more books for the kid who takes things apart just to see how they work.
No parade here, just a boy stepping straight into paintings. Imagine! by Raúl Colón trusts pictures alone to carry that same jump into wonder.
A clever spider man sets out to buy all the world's stories from the Sky God, who demands an impossible price: a fierce leopard, a fire-stinging hornet, and a fairy no one can see.
The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins by Barbara Kerley follows another real inventor who built something the world had never seen, with the same triumph-after-struggle arc.
A collection of poems invites young readers through seven die-cut doorways into moods and moments — a dragon piñata, an alligator on the A train, a hungry yeti — turning everyday feelings into flights of imagination.
Sarg builds wonder from paper and imagination; Liang and the Magic Paintbrush by Demi gives a poor boy a brush that turns imagination into real objects.
Less biography, more everyday wonder. Red is a Dragon: A Book of Colors by Roseanne Thong turns a walk through the world into the same kind of color-struck delight.
If your kid liked meeting the real person behind something they love, The Important Thing About Margaret Wise Brown by Mac Barnett does that for the author of Goodnight Moon.
Across a city, ninety-two men and thirteen women bathe, dress in black-and-white clothes, and gather their instruments before heading to midtown for an 8:30 concert.
A true story about a young inventor who builds his own microphone from a broomstick, a cinderblock, and a telephone, then goes on to engineer the world's first solid-body electric guitar.
A little Chinese boy named Fish begs his father to buy him the biggest fish-shaped kite in the shop — then a great wind called Tai Fung sweeps in and changes everything.
Skip this one if your kid needs a clear invention to follow. The Noisy Paint Box: The Colors and Sounds of Kandinsky's Abstract Art by Barb Rosenstock is about hearing colors, which asks for more patience.
A young painter defies a male-dominated art world by pouring paint straight onto canvas and pushing it with mops and squeegees, inventing a whole new way to make pictures.
