Review: Sweet, M. (2011). Balloons over Broadway: The true story of the puppeteer of Macy’s Parade.

Sweet, M. (2011). Balloons over Broadway: The true story of the puppeteer of Macy’s Parade. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Books for Children.

A former Texas Bluebonnet Award nominee and Robert F. Sibert Medal winner, Balloons over Broadway tells the true story behind the inception of the long-standing Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, an American institution.  Biographical, this colorful storybook tells of Tony Sarg, the puppeteer who first created oversized helium-filled balloons that would eventually evolve into the giant balloons of contemporary tradition.  

Humorous artwork interjects useful information, such as the little clown who informs the reader that “Sarg rhymes with aargh!”  Even as a young child in the late 19th century, the creator was inventive and fascinated with how things move. After he became well-known for his lifelike marionettes, he was recruited to design a “puppet parade” for the elaborate holiday windows at Macy’s in New York City.  Sweet goes on to explain that the first street parade was intended to pay homage to various “street carnivals from all the world,” and to please the store workers and other people of New York who hailed from diverse homelands and cultures; it then became inseparably linked with America’s unique holiday, Thanksgiving.  From Tony’s first “big puppets” in 1927 to the modern day parade viewed by over forty million people each Thanksgiving, this is a story celebrating the importance of ingenuity and innovation.

Bright, multimedia watercolors and pieced collage including “found objects” accompany the informative but engaging text, both by Sweet, a Caldecott Honor winner for her illustrations in A River of Words.  She uses a vertical double page-spread at one point so that, in turning the book, the reader can appreciate the height that “the upside-down marionettes” achieved: “up to the skies!”  Her child-like love for the magic of puppetry shines through this playful work, and will entertain even as it informs the youngest readers.

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