Books like Fireboat: The Heroic Adventures of the John J. Harvey
By Maira Kalman
For the kid who loves trucks, boats, and anything with a job to do, this is the true story of a machine that got a second chance to be useful when the whole city needed it. Warm, plainspoken, and quietly stirring, with a true story that moves from playful history to solemn courage.
A young girl, her waitress mother, and her grandma save every spare coin in a big jar, hoping to finally buy a comfortable chair after a fire destroyed their old furniture.
A bricklayer works hard every day building the city, while his son works hard at school and plays at molding tiny clay bricks, until one Saturday his father surprises him with something built just for their family.
A country cottontail raising twenty-one children dreams of becoming an Easter Bunny, and when the wise Grandfather Bunny notices how capably she runs her big household, he chooses her for the job.
A young left-handed girl picks up her brother's guitar, flips it upside down to play it her own way, and by age eleven has written "Freight Train," a song the world would come to know.
A Black boy growing up in segregated 1940s North Carolina loves to draw everything around him, but becomes a football star instead — until his dream of making art finds its way to him.
A determined young dancer in the 1930s and 40s trains for ballet despite discriminatory schools, then refuses to paint her skin white for a company's offer — and rises to become the Met Opera's first Black prima ballerina.
A real-life picture book biography follows young Alma Thomas from a childhood soaking up color in Georgia to becoming a celebrated painter — teaching art for decades before beginning her own boundlessly colorful paintings near age seventy.
A biography of jazz pioneer Duke Ellington, tracing his rise from playing pool halls and cabarets as a teenager to leading his orchestra through a groundbreaking Carnegie Hall performance of Black, Brown, and Beige.
The true story of a boy born to formerly enslaved parents who reads the newspaper aloud to his father every day, then carries that hunger for knowledge into the coal mines and beyond, eventually transforming how the world understands Black history.
A boy who longs to be a trumpeter can only play an imaginary horn, until a musician from the neighborhood night club notices his ambition and takes him seriously.
A penniless orphan boy travels to London hoping to find his fortune, and it's his clever cat's rat-catching skill that changes both their lives forever.
A legendary railroad worker, born with a hammer in his hand and stronger than anyone around, takes on a steam drill to see who can dig through a mountain faster.
