Queens |
New York City has to be one of the greatest places in America, if not the world.
Luckily for us, many authors have chronicled The Big Apple's antics in a way just right
for kids.
Here are some of
the books available. This is not yet a complete list, but I'm adding
books to the list daily. If you wish to purchase any of these books, click on either the title or the book cover to be directed to Amazon.com. As a warning, I have put up pictures of the book covers to give you somewhat an idea of the style of each book (I know, I know. "Don't judge a book by its cover") so the pages may load slowly, depending on the speed of your internet connection.
The categories below are sorted by approximate age group and topical categories. Feel free to browse around. The same links are located on the left side of your screen. To return back to this page, simply click on the "Welcome" link on the left.
If this website came up without frames, click here to see the complete "New York City Books for Kids" website with frames.
Other Pages of Interest:
Fiction & Historical Fiction:
General Books About New York City (Nonfiction) |
Fiction NYC Picture Books and "Easy Reader" Stories (Ages 4-8) |
Fiction NYC Books (Ages 9-12) |
New York Fiction for Young Adults |
New York Historical Fiction (Colonial Period and Revolutionary War) |
New York Historical Fiction (Ellis Island & Immigration) |
New York Historical Fiction (Life in the 1800s) |
New York Historical Fiction (Life in the 1900s)
NYC History:
New York Biographies |
Native Americans from New York (History and Historical Fiction) |
New York History (Colonial Period and Revolutionary War) |
New York History (Immigration and Ellis Island) |
New York History (The 1800s) |
New York History (The 1900s) |
The World Trade Center and September 11, 2001 |
NYC Locations:
The Statue of Liberty |
The Empire State Building |
Central Park |
NYC Art Museums (Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, etc.) |
NYC's American Museum of Natural History |
Harlem Books (Including books about the Harlem Renaissance) |
Chinatown Books |
Little Italy Books |
The New York City Subway System |
Brooklyn Books |
The Bronx Books |
Queens Books |
Staten Island Books |
Long Island Books |
Upstate New York Books |
New York State Books
Life and Travel in NYC:
Thanksgiving in New York City |
Christmas in New York City |
New York Sports Teams and Players
The NYC Fire Department (FDNY) and NY Police Department (NYPD) |
General Books About Cities |
New York City and New York State Test Preparation and Study Guides |
New York Regents Review Books |
Parenting in New York City |
New York Travel Guides for Families with Children
NYC Toys, Puzzles, and Games (For Kids & Adults) |
Amazon.com Coupon Codes
Fiction for Beginning Readers
Gina
By Bernard Waber
With a lively rhyming text and energetic line-and-watercolor pictures, the author and illustrator of Ira Says Goodbye (1988) offers another book about moving. When Gina moves to an apartment in Queens, there are no girls her age in the neighborhood. Just boys everywhere. At first she's lonely, but she loves sports, and when she shows that she can slam the ball right over third base, she's part of the crowd. Still, she clings to her dream "of someday seeing other girls play on her team." The story's a bit purposive, but Waber has fun with names and rhymes ("Yusuf, Yakov, Laird, and Sonny. If it weren't so weird, it could have been funny" ). The pictures show that the guys on the street may all be boys, boys galore on every floor, but they come in all shapes and sizes, colors and crews.
Description from Booklist
How Pizza Came to Queens
By Dayal Kaur Khalsa
An Italian visitor to Queens bemoans the unavailability of pizza until some thoughtful girls enable her to make some.
Description from Publisher
May, of My Family Vacation , is staying with her good friends Linda, Judy and Peggy Penny while her parents are away. The Penny family is visited by a distant cousin, elderly Mrs. Pelligrini, who walks through the kitchen door, sniffs the air and immediately declares, ``Is no good.'' The girls notice that the only time the elderly visitor is really happy is when she is cooking, and they all wonder about the mysterious ``pizza'' that Mrs. Pelligrini misses so much. ``Maybe it's her daughter . . . '' says one of the girls. ``Or her dog,'' ventures another. When the girls learn, at the library, the meaning of the word pizza, they copy the list of ingredients and then go shopping. Mrs. Pelligrini, seeing the items the girls have assembled, flies into action, and soon the house is filled with the aroma of the bubbling, baking pie. This amusing story is embellished with Khalsa's intensely colored paintings in her vigorous primitive style, each one brimming with details of family life a few decades ago. The delicious-looking endpapers depict pizza pies falling from a beautiful blue sky.
Description from Publishers Weekly
Can you imagine the world B. P. (before pizza)? When Mrs. Pelligrino visits relatives in a quiet Queens (New York) neighborhood c. 1950, local knowledge of Italian language and cuisine is limited to spaghetti, macaroni, and lasagna. Their glum visitor speaks little English, so the children try without much success both to cheer her up and to understand her reiterated complaint: ``No pizza!'' Finally the girls do a bit of research, and then buy the necessary ingredients. Mrs. Pelligrino is ecstatic and unwraps the rolling pin that she has been cradling. The children are skeptical--their reaction to the recipe had been ``Yuk''--but the finished product thrills everyone. Khalsa's paintings are also satisfying: a wide range of flat, bright colors in her naive style conveys the cheerful simplicity of a lost Eden. The jacket illustration, a smiling Mrs. P. and her four young friends whirling dough aloft, and the pizza-in-the-sky endpapers are particularly successful. Culinary historians may question this version of pizza's advent (and the text might have been shorter), but, like its subject, this product should appeal to popular tastes.
Description from School Library Journal
The story is wonderful. It takes place at some unidentified time in the past (probably late 40s or early 50s), when an elderly Italian relative, Mrs. Pellegrino, pays a visit to Queens and is disappointed to discover there's no pizza there -- but she doesn't speak English well enough to explain what pizza is. The children she visits want to make her happy, so they do everything they can to find out what pizza is so they can get one for Mrs. Pellegrino. They finally find the answer in the library (using a dictionary and then a cookbook), and buy all the ingredients, thinking all the while that a PIE made with TOMATOES sounds disgusting. To say the least, they get a pleasant surprise.
It's a funny and charming story, but it's a lot more than that, too. I think it's very important for children to learn to appreciate other cultures, and a book showing that their favorite food has not been in this country forever, but came over with immigrants, is a great way to help them see foreign cultures and people in a positive way. The children in the story are also great role models. The find Mrs. Pellegrino odd (her difficulty with English even makes her seem a little mean at first), but they are able to put aside their feelings and try to help her feel at home. And they're rewarded for their kindness with their first taste of pizza Ð now there's a reward most kids can appreciate.
Description from Amazon.com Customer Review
Fiction for Older Readers
Lily's Crossing
By Patricia Reilly Giff
Awards:
- Newbery Honor Book
Elizabeth Mollahan--the Lily of Lily's Crossing--lost her mom when she was little. Her father and a grandmother are her only family. Every summer the three of them flee sweaty New York City for a beach house in New York's Rockaways.
This year though, Lily's father announces that he's enlisted in the Army; days later, he is gone. Alone with her grandmother, Lily sees a long lonely summer ahead. And then, Albert appears. A refugee from the Nazis, his family thrown to the winds, young Albert bears a grief and sadness of his own.
It's a pleasure to read along as Lily and Albert negotiate the pain they feel and the secrets and adventures they share. With subtlety and compassion, this gift of a book reminds us that wars happen to children, too.
[10 and up. Adults should sneak a peek too.]
Description from Amazon.com
Exceptional characterizations and a robust story line turn this WWII homefront novel into far more than a period piece. Spending the summer of '44 at her family's vacation home on the Atlantic, Lily feels angry and deserted when her widower father joins the Army and is sent to Europe just after the Allied invasion. Her ever-critical Gram seems to be breathing down her neck at every turn, and Lily has gotten off on the wrong foot with Albert, the Hungarian refugee boy staying with neighbors. She just can't seem to break out of her self-described role as "a last-row, last-seat kid in school with terrible marks... [who] told lies every other minute." Giff keeps the spotlight off Lily's flaws, refraining as well from overtly linking them to her self-consciousness at being motherless. Rather, she uses them to generate the plot: as Lily and Albert work their way into friendship, Lily tells a lie with unexpected and potentially dangerous consequences. Lily learns her lesson in a resolution that feels psychologically true. In the background, characters cope with wartime shortages, stumble into tragedy as sons and brothers fall in battle-in short, lead complicated lives with the hope of redemption. Closely observed, quickly paced and warmly told, this has all the ingredients that best reward readers.
Description from Publishers Weekly
Set during World War II, this tenderly written story tells of the war's impact on two children, one an American and one a Hungarian refugee. Lily Mollahan, a spirited, sensitive youngster being raised by her grandmother and Poppy, her widower father, has a comfortable routine that includes the family's annual summer migration to Gram's beach house in Rockaway, NY. Lily looks forward to summer's freedom and fishing outings with Poppy. She meets Albert, a Hungarian boy who is staying at a neighbor's house. At first, her fertile imagination convinces her that perhaps Albert is a Nazi spy, but eventually the two become good friends. The war interferes directly with Lily's life when Poppy, an engineer, is sent to Europe to help with clean-up operations. History is brought to life through Giff's well chosen details and descriptions. Both children suffer from the separation from loved ones, and both live with guilt for not having said proper good-byes. Albert even feels that he in some ways betrayed his sister Ruth, who was too ill to make the transatlantic journey. The developing friendship between Lily and Albert, and Albert's plan to swim to Europe to find Ruth, will grab readers' attention and sustain it to book's end. Despite convenient plot twists to reach a happy ending, Giff's well-drawn, believable characters and vivid prose style make this an excellent choice. A fine addition to collections that include Sonia Levitin's Silver Days.
Description from School Library Journal
6-321
By Michael Laser
Sixth grade is a watershed year for Marc Chaikin, a student in Queens, NY in the 1960s. "In just two months I fell in love, watched my family break into pieces, and came this close to getting beat to a pulp...not to mention meeting Mickey Mantle..." Author Laser drew on his own experiences in writing this, as he relates in an afterword, and the well-written story rings true in its careful detailing of Marc's varied experiences. He's afraid of his new teacher at first, but comes to appreciate the man's high standards, and similarly comes to see his love interest, a shy girl who longs to be wild, in a new light. As his parents' relationship deteriorates, and everything around him changes, Marc realizes that he can change also, and he learns to speak out when it matters. This is a heartfelt tale that succeeds in conveying Marc's story while touching on universal themes. For younger YAs in middle school and upper elementary grades.
Description from KLIATT
Marc Chaikin's life has always been stable and steady but he is about to discover hatred and first love. Marc and his friends in 6-321 (the highest academic class) are being bullied by the students in 6-309 (the lowest academic achievers) and anger and hostility are escalating. Meanwhile, he is fighting the most popular boy in class for the affection of Lily Wu, his idea of the perfect girl. On the day of the agreed "big fight," President Kennedy is shot, and priorities suddenly change. Written in a direct style, and set within the narrow confines of Queens, NY, in 1963, this coming-of-age story subtly draws readers in. Laser's uncomplicated language allows his theme about image and expectation to come through clearly.
Description from School Library Journal
The Queens Jazz Trail Map and Walking Tour
By Ephemera Press
While New Orleans may boast that it is the "birthplace of jazz," New York City's borough of Queens has its own proud claim: it has been the "home of jazz," the residence of choice for hundreds of the music's leading players. The award winning Queens Jazz Trail map (originally commissioned by Flushing Town Hall) shows the different neighborhoods and sites that are part of this hidden jazz history. Featuring portraits of jazz greats and drawings of their houses, this pictorial map makes a beautiful poster. The back of the map contains a short history of jazz in Queens; the addresses of homes once occupied by jazz musicians; and sites of current interest to jazz fans.
Each CultureMap explores a specific New York City neighborhood, focusing on the people and places that have made that neighborhood famous. The front side of each publication features a beautifully illustrated pictorial map done by a well-known artist. The backsides provide the itinerary for a neighborhood walking tour that has been carefully researched by a team of educators. CultureMaps are designed for scholars, tourists, locals, students and others interested in history and culture. The maps are available in both a folded format and as unfolded posters suitable for framing.
Description from Publisher
Nonfiction
Back to "New York City Books for Kids"
Still can't find what you're looking for? Search Amazon.com's database directly.
©2002-2003
(NOTE: The advertisements below have not been placed on the site by its owners. We are not responsible for their content.)
If this website came up without frames, click here to see the complete "New York City Books for Kids" website with frames.
Other Pages of Interest:
Fiction & Historical Fiction:
General Books About New York City (Nonfiction) |
Fiction NYC Picture Books and "Easy Reader" Stories (Ages 4-8) |
Fiction NYC Books (Ages 9-12) |
New York Fiction for Young Adults |
New York Historical Fiction (Colonial Period and Revolutionary War) |
New York Historical Fiction (Ellis Island & Immigration) |
New York Historical Fiction (Life in the 1800s) |
New York Historical Fiction (Life in the 1900s)
NYC History:
New York Biographies |
Native Americans from New York (History and Historical Fiction) |
New York History (Colonial Period and Revolutionary War) |
New York History (Immigration and Ellis Island) |
New York History (The 1800s) |
New York History (The 1900s) |
The World Trade Center and September 11, 2001 |
NYC Locations:
The Statue of Liberty |
The Empire State Building |
Central Park |
NYC Art Museums (Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, etc.) |
NYC's American Museum of Natural History |
Harlem Books (Including books about the Harlem Renaissance) |
Chinatown Books |
Little Italy Books |
The New York City Subway System |
Brooklyn Books |
The Bronx Books |
Queens Books |
Staten Island Books |
Long Island Books |
Upstate New York Books |
New York State Books
Life and Travel in NYC:
Thanksgiving in New York City |
Christmas in New York City |
New York Sports Teams and Players
The NYC Fire Department (FDNY) and NY Police Department (NYPD) |
General Books About Cities |
New York City and New York State Test Preparation and Study Guides |
New York Regents Review Books |
Parenting in New York City |
New York Travel Guides for Families with Children
NYC Toys, Puzzles, and Games (For Kids & Adults) |
Amazon.com Coupon Codes
Fiction for Beginning Readers
Gina
By Bernard Waber
With a lively rhyming text and energetic line-and-watercolor pictures, the author and illustrator of Ira Says Goodbye (1988) offers another book about moving. When Gina moves to an apartment in Queens, there are no girls her age in the neighborhood. Just boys everywhere. At first she's lonely, but she loves sports, and when she shows that she can slam the ball right over third base, she's part of the crowd. Still, she clings to her dream "of someday seeing other girls play on her team." The story's a bit purposive, but Waber has fun with names and rhymes ("Yusuf, Yakov, Laird, and Sonny. If it weren't so weird, it could have been funny" ). The pictures show that the guys on the street may all be boys, boys galore on every floor, but they come in all shapes and sizes, colors and crews.
Description from Booklist
How Pizza Came to Queens
By Dayal Kaur Khalsa
An Italian visitor to Queens bemoans the unavailability of pizza until some thoughtful girls enable her to make some.
Description from Publisher
May, of My Family Vacation , is staying with her good friends Linda, Judy and Peggy Penny while her parents are away. The Penny family is visited by a distant cousin, elderly Mrs. Pelligrini, who walks through the kitchen door, sniffs the air and immediately declares, ``Is no good.'' The girls notice that the only time the elderly visitor is really happy is when she is cooking, and they all wonder about the mysterious ``pizza'' that Mrs. Pelligrini misses so much. ``Maybe it's her daughter . . . '' says one of the girls. ``Or her dog,'' ventures another. When the girls learn, at the library, the meaning of the word pizza, they copy the list of ingredients and then go shopping. Mrs. Pelligrini, seeing the items the girls have assembled, flies into action, and soon the house is filled with the aroma of the bubbling, baking pie. This amusing story is embellished with Khalsa's intensely colored paintings in her vigorous primitive style, each one brimming with details of family life a few decades ago. The delicious-looking endpapers depict pizza pies falling from a beautiful blue sky.
Description from Publishers Weekly
Can you imagine the world B. P. (before pizza)? When Mrs. Pelligrino visits relatives in a quiet Queens (New York) neighborhood c. 1950, local knowledge of Italian language and cuisine is limited to spaghetti, macaroni, and lasagna. Their glum visitor speaks little English, so the children try without much success both to cheer her up and to understand her reiterated complaint: ``No pizza!'' Finally the girls do a bit of research, and then buy the necessary ingredients. Mrs. Pelligrino is ecstatic and unwraps the rolling pin that she has been cradling. The children are skeptical--their reaction to the recipe had been ``Yuk''--but the finished product thrills everyone. Khalsa's paintings are also satisfying: a wide range of flat, bright colors in her naive style conveys the cheerful simplicity of a lost Eden. The jacket illustration, a smiling Mrs. P. and her four young friends whirling dough aloft, and the pizza-in-the-sky endpapers are particularly successful. Culinary historians may question this version of pizza's advent (and the text might have been shorter), but, like its subject, this product should appeal to popular tastes.
Description from School Library Journal
The story is wonderful. It takes place at some unidentified time in the past (probably late 40s or early 50s), when an elderly Italian relative, Mrs. Pellegrino, pays a visit to Queens and is disappointed to discover there's no pizza there -- but she doesn't speak English well enough to explain what pizza is. The children she visits want to make her happy, so they do everything they can to find out what pizza is so they can get one for Mrs. Pellegrino. They finally find the answer in the library (using a dictionary and then a cookbook), and buy all the ingredients, thinking all the while that a PIE made with TOMATOES sounds disgusting. To say the least, they get a pleasant surprise.
It's a funny and charming story, but it's a lot more than that, too. I think it's very important for children to learn to appreciate other cultures, and a book showing that their favorite food has not been in this country forever, but came over with immigrants, is a great way to help them see foreign cultures and people in a positive way. The children in the story are also great role models. The find Mrs. Pellegrino odd (her difficulty with English even makes her seem a little mean at first), but they are able to put aside their feelings and try to help her feel at home. And they're rewarded for their kindness with their first taste of pizza Ð now there's a reward most kids can appreciate.
Description from Amazon.com Customer Review
Fiction for Older Readers
Lily's Crossing
By Patricia Reilly Giff
Awards:
- Newbery Honor Book
Elizabeth Mollahan--the Lily of Lily's Crossing--lost her mom when she was little. Her father and a grandmother are her only family. Every summer the three of them flee sweaty New York City for a beach house in New York's Rockaways.
This year though, Lily's father announces that he's enlisted in the Army; days later, he is gone. Alone with her grandmother, Lily sees a long lonely summer ahead. And then, Albert appears. A refugee from the Nazis, his family thrown to the winds, young Albert bears a grief and sadness of his own.
It's a pleasure to read along as Lily and Albert negotiate the pain they feel and the secrets and adventures they share. With subtlety and compassion, this gift of a book reminds us that wars happen to children, too.
[10 and up. Adults should sneak a peek too.]
Description from Amazon.com
Exceptional characterizations and a robust story line turn this WWII homefront novel into far more than a period piece. Spending the summer of '44 at her family's vacation home on the Atlantic, Lily feels angry and deserted when her widower father joins the Army and is sent to Europe just after the Allied invasion. Her ever-critical Gram seems to be breathing down her neck at every turn, and Lily has gotten off on the wrong foot with Albert, the Hungarian refugee boy staying with neighbors. She just can't seem to break out of her self-described role as "a last-row, last-seat kid in school with terrible marks... [who] told lies every other minute." Giff keeps the spotlight off Lily's flaws, refraining as well from overtly linking them to her self-consciousness at being motherless. Rather, she uses them to generate the plot: as Lily and Albert work their way into friendship, Lily tells a lie with unexpected and potentially dangerous consequences. Lily learns her lesson in a resolution that feels psychologically true. In the background, characters cope with wartime shortages, stumble into tragedy as sons and brothers fall in battle-in short, lead complicated lives with the hope of redemption. Closely observed, quickly paced and warmly told, this has all the ingredients that best reward readers.
Description from Publishers Weekly
Set during World War II, this tenderly written story tells of the war's impact on two children, one an American and one a Hungarian refugee. Lily Mollahan, a spirited, sensitive youngster being raised by her grandmother and Poppy, her widower father, has a comfortable routine that includes the family's annual summer migration to Gram's beach house in Rockaway, NY. Lily looks forward to summer's freedom and fishing outings with Poppy. She meets Albert, a Hungarian boy who is staying at a neighbor's house. At first, her fertile imagination convinces her that perhaps Albert is a Nazi spy, but eventually the two become good friends. The war interferes directly with Lily's life when Poppy, an engineer, is sent to Europe to help with clean-up operations. History is brought to life through Giff's well chosen details and descriptions. Both children suffer from the separation from loved ones, and both live with guilt for not having said proper good-byes. Albert even feels that he in some ways betrayed his sister Ruth, who was too ill to make the transatlantic journey. The developing friendship between Lily and Albert, and Albert's plan to swim to Europe to find Ruth, will grab readers' attention and sustain it to book's end. Despite convenient plot twists to reach a happy ending, Giff's well-drawn, believable characters and vivid prose style make this an excellent choice. A fine addition to collections that include Sonia Levitin's Silver Days.
Description from School Library Journal
6-321
By Michael Laser
Sixth grade is a watershed year for Marc Chaikin, a student in Queens, NY in the 1960s. "In just two months I fell in love, watched my family break into pieces, and came this close to getting beat to a pulp...not to mention meeting Mickey Mantle..." Author Laser drew on his own experiences in writing this, as he relates in an afterword, and the well-written story rings true in its careful detailing of Marc's varied experiences. He's afraid of his new teacher at first, but comes to appreciate the man's high standards, and similarly comes to see his love interest, a shy girl who longs to be wild, in a new light. As his parents' relationship deteriorates, and everything around him changes, Marc realizes that he can change also, and he learns to speak out when it matters. This is a heartfelt tale that succeeds in conveying Marc's story while touching on universal themes. For younger YAs in middle school and upper elementary grades.
Description from KLIATT
Marc Chaikin's life has always been stable and steady but he is about to discover hatred and first love. Marc and his friends in 6-321 (the highest academic class) are being bullied by the students in 6-309 (the lowest academic achievers) and anger and hostility are escalating. Meanwhile, he is fighting the most popular boy in class for the affection of Lily Wu, his idea of the perfect girl. On the day of the agreed "big fight," President Kennedy is shot, and priorities suddenly change. Written in a direct style, and set within the narrow confines of Queens, NY, in 1963, this coming-of-age story subtly draws readers in. Laser's uncomplicated language allows his theme about image and expectation to come through clearly.
Description from School Library Journal
The Queens Jazz Trail Map and Walking Tour
By Ephemera Press
While New Orleans may boast that it is the "birthplace of jazz," New York City's borough of Queens has its own proud claim: it has been the "home of jazz," the residence of choice for hundreds of the music's leading players. The award winning Queens Jazz Trail map (originally commissioned by Flushing Town Hall) shows the different neighborhoods and sites that are part of this hidden jazz history. Featuring portraits of jazz greats and drawings of their houses, this pictorial map makes a beautiful poster. The back of the map contains a short history of jazz in Queens; the addresses of homes once occupied by jazz musicians; and sites of current interest to jazz fans.
Each CultureMap explores a specific New York City neighborhood, focusing on the people and places that have made that neighborhood famous. The front side of each publication features a beautifully illustrated pictorial map done by a well-known artist. The backsides provide the itinerary for a neighborhood walking tour that has been carefully researched by a team of educators. CultureMaps are designed for scholars, tourists, locals, students and others interested in history and culture. The maps are available in both a folded format and as unfolded posters suitable for framing.
Description from Publisher
Nonfiction
Back to "New York City Books for Kids"
Still can't find what you're looking for? Search Amazon.com's database directly.
©2002-2003
(NOTE: The advertisements below have not been placed on the site by its owners. We are not responsible for their content.)
Other Pages of Interest:
Fiction & Historical Fiction:
General Books About New York City (Nonfiction) |
Fiction NYC Picture Books and "Easy Reader" Stories (Ages 4-8) |
Fiction NYC Books (Ages 9-12) |
New York Fiction for Young Adults |
New York Historical Fiction (Colonial Period and Revolutionary War) |
New York Historical Fiction (Ellis Island & Immigration) |
New York Historical Fiction (Life in the 1800s) |
New York Historical Fiction (Life in the 1900s)
NYC History:
New York Biographies |
Native Americans from New York (History and Historical Fiction) |
New York History (Colonial Period and Revolutionary War) |
New York History (Immigration and Ellis Island) |
New York History (The 1800s) |
New York History (The 1900s) |
The World Trade Center and September 11, 2001 |
NYC Locations:
The Statue of Liberty |
The Empire State Building |
Central Park |
NYC Art Museums (Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, etc.) |
NYC's American Museum of Natural History |
Harlem Books (Including books about the Harlem Renaissance) |
Chinatown Books |
Little Italy Books |
The New York City Subway System |
Brooklyn Books |
The Bronx Books |
Queens Books |
Staten Island Books |
Long Island Books |
Upstate New York Books |
New York State Books
Life and Travel in NYC:
Thanksgiving in New York City |
Christmas in New York City |
New York Sports Teams and Players
The NYC Fire Department (FDNY) and NY Police Department (NYPD) |
General Books About Cities |
New York City and New York State Test Preparation and Study Guides |
New York Regents Review Books |
Parenting in New York City |
New York Travel Guides for Families with Children
NYC Toys, Puzzles, and Games (For Kids & Adults) |
Amazon.com Coupon Codes
Fiction for Beginning Readers
Gina
By Bernard Waber
With a lively rhyming text and energetic line-and-watercolor pictures, the author and illustrator of Ira Says Goodbye (1988) offers another book about moving. When Gina moves to an apartment in Queens, there are no girls her age in the neighborhood. Just boys everywhere. At first she's lonely, but she loves sports, and when she shows that she can slam the ball right over third base, she's part of the crowd. Still, she clings to her dream "of someday seeing other girls play on her team." The story's a bit purposive, but Waber has fun with names and rhymes ("Yusuf, Yakov, Laird, and Sonny. If it weren't so weird, it could have been funny" ). The pictures show that the guys on the street may all be boys, boys galore on every floor, but they come in all shapes and sizes, colors and crews.
Description from Booklist
How Pizza Came to Queens
By Dayal Kaur Khalsa
An Italian visitor to Queens bemoans the unavailability of pizza until some thoughtful girls enable her to make some.
Description from Publisher
May, of My Family Vacation , is staying with her good friends Linda, Judy and Peggy Penny while her parents are away. The Penny family is visited by a distant cousin, elderly Mrs. Pelligrini, who walks through the kitchen door, sniffs the air and immediately declares, ``Is no good.'' The girls notice that the only time the elderly visitor is really happy is when she is cooking, and they all wonder about the mysterious ``pizza'' that Mrs. Pelligrini misses so much. ``Maybe it's her daughter . . . '' says one of the girls. ``Or her dog,'' ventures another. When the girls learn, at the library, the meaning of the word pizza, they copy the list of ingredients and then go shopping. Mrs. Pelligrini, seeing the items the girls have assembled, flies into action, and soon the house is filled with the aroma of the bubbling, baking pie. This amusing story is embellished with Khalsa's intensely colored paintings in her vigorous primitive style, each one brimming with details of family life a few decades ago. The delicious-looking endpapers depict pizza pies falling from a beautiful blue sky.
Description from Publishers Weekly
Can you imagine the world B. P. (before pizza)? When Mrs. Pelligrino visits relatives in a quiet Queens (New York) neighborhood c. 1950, local knowledge of Italian language and cuisine is limited to spaghetti, macaroni, and lasagna. Their glum visitor speaks little English, so the children try without much success both to cheer her up and to understand her reiterated complaint: ``No pizza!'' Finally the girls do a bit of research, and then buy the necessary ingredients. Mrs. Pelligrino is ecstatic and unwraps the rolling pin that she has been cradling. The children are skeptical--their reaction to the recipe had been ``Yuk''--but the finished product thrills everyone. Khalsa's paintings are also satisfying: a wide range of flat, bright colors in her naive style conveys the cheerful simplicity of a lost Eden. The jacket illustration, a smiling Mrs. P. and her four young friends whirling dough aloft, and the pizza-in-the-sky endpapers are particularly successful. Culinary historians may question this version of pizza's advent (and the text might have been shorter), but, like its subject, this product should appeal to popular tastes.
Description from School Library Journal
The story is wonderful. It takes place at some unidentified time in the past (probably late 40s or early 50s), when an elderly Italian relative, Mrs. Pellegrino, pays a visit to Queens and is disappointed to discover there's no pizza there -- but she doesn't speak English well enough to explain what pizza is. The children she visits want to make her happy, so they do everything they can to find out what pizza is so they can get one for Mrs. Pellegrino. They finally find the answer in the library (using a dictionary and then a cookbook), and buy all the ingredients, thinking all the while that a PIE made with TOMATOES sounds disgusting. To say the least, they get a pleasant surprise.
It's a funny and charming story, but it's a lot more than that, too. I think it's very important for children to learn to appreciate other cultures, and a book showing that their favorite food has not been in this country forever, but came over with immigrants, is a great way to help them see foreign cultures and people in a positive way. The children in the story are also great role models. The find Mrs. Pellegrino odd (her difficulty with English even makes her seem a little mean at first), but they are able to put aside their feelings and try to help her feel at home. And they're rewarded for their kindness with their first taste of pizza Ð now there's a reward most kids can appreciate.
Description from Amazon.com Customer Review
Fiction for Older Readers
Lily's Crossing
By Patricia Reilly Giff
Awards:
- Newbery Honor Book
Elizabeth Mollahan--the Lily of Lily's Crossing--lost her mom when she was little. Her father and a grandmother are her only family. Every summer the three of them flee sweaty New York City for a beach house in New York's Rockaways.
This year though, Lily's father announces that he's enlisted in the Army; days later, he is gone. Alone with her grandmother, Lily sees a long lonely summer ahead. And then, Albert appears. A refugee from the Nazis, his family thrown to the winds, young Albert bears a grief and sadness of his own.
It's a pleasure to read along as Lily and Albert negotiate the pain they feel and the secrets and adventures they share. With subtlety and compassion, this gift of a book reminds us that wars happen to children, too.
[10 and up. Adults should sneak a peek too.]
Description from Amazon.com
Exceptional characterizations and a robust story line turn this WWII homefront novel into far more than a period piece. Spending the summer of '44 at her family's vacation home on the Atlantic, Lily feels angry and deserted when her widower father joins the Army and is sent to Europe just after the Allied invasion. Her ever-critical Gram seems to be breathing down her neck at every turn, and Lily has gotten off on the wrong foot with Albert, the Hungarian refugee boy staying with neighbors. She just can't seem to break out of her self-described role as "a last-row, last-seat kid in school with terrible marks... [who] told lies every other minute." Giff keeps the spotlight off Lily's flaws, refraining as well from overtly linking them to her self-consciousness at being motherless. Rather, she uses them to generate the plot: as Lily and Albert work their way into friendship, Lily tells a lie with unexpected and potentially dangerous consequences. Lily learns her lesson in a resolution that feels psychologically true. In the background, characters cope with wartime shortages, stumble into tragedy as sons and brothers fall in battle-in short, lead complicated lives with the hope of redemption. Closely observed, quickly paced and warmly told, this has all the ingredients that best reward readers.
Description from Publishers Weekly
Set during World War II, this tenderly written story tells of the war's impact on two children, one an American and one a Hungarian refugee. Lily Mollahan, a spirited, sensitive youngster being raised by her grandmother and Poppy, her widower father, has a comfortable routine that includes the family's annual summer migration to Gram's beach house in Rockaway, NY. Lily looks forward to summer's freedom and fishing outings with Poppy. She meets Albert, a Hungarian boy who is staying at a neighbor's house. At first, her fertile imagination convinces her that perhaps Albert is a Nazi spy, but eventually the two become good friends. The war interferes directly with Lily's life when Poppy, an engineer, is sent to Europe to help with clean-up operations. History is brought to life through Giff's well chosen details and descriptions. Both children suffer from the separation from loved ones, and both live with guilt for not having said proper good-byes. Albert even feels that he in some ways betrayed his sister Ruth, who was too ill to make the transatlantic journey. The developing friendship between Lily and Albert, and Albert's plan to swim to Europe to find Ruth, will grab readers' attention and sustain it to book's end. Despite convenient plot twists to reach a happy ending, Giff's well-drawn, believable characters and vivid prose style make this an excellent choice. A fine addition to collections that include Sonia Levitin's Silver Days.
Description from School Library Journal
6-321
By Michael Laser
Sixth grade is a watershed year for Marc Chaikin, a student in Queens, NY in the 1960s. "In just two months I fell in love, watched my family break into pieces, and came this close to getting beat to a pulp...not to mention meeting Mickey Mantle..." Author Laser drew on his own experiences in writing this, as he relates in an afterword, and the well-written story rings true in its careful detailing of Marc's varied experiences. He's afraid of his new teacher at first, but comes to appreciate the man's high standards, and similarly comes to see his love interest, a shy girl who longs to be wild, in a new light. As his parents' relationship deteriorates, and everything around him changes, Marc realizes that he can change also, and he learns to speak out when it matters. This is a heartfelt tale that succeeds in conveying Marc's story while touching on universal themes. For younger YAs in middle school and upper elementary grades.
Description from KLIATT
Marc Chaikin's life has always been stable and steady but he is about to discover hatred and first love. Marc and his friends in 6-321 (the highest academic class) are being bullied by the students in 6-309 (the lowest academic achievers) and anger and hostility are escalating. Meanwhile, he is fighting the most popular boy in class for the affection of Lily Wu, his idea of the perfect girl. On the day of the agreed "big fight," President Kennedy is shot, and priorities suddenly change. Written in a direct style, and set within the narrow confines of Queens, NY, in 1963, this coming-of-age story subtly draws readers in. Laser's uncomplicated language allows his theme about image and expectation to come through clearly.
Description from School Library Journal
The Queens Jazz Trail Map and Walking Tour
By Ephemera Press
While New Orleans may boast that it is the "birthplace of jazz," New York City's borough of Queens has its own proud claim: it has been the "home of jazz," the residence of choice for hundreds of the music's leading players. The award winning Queens Jazz Trail map (originally commissioned by Flushing Town Hall) shows the different neighborhoods and sites that are part of this hidden jazz history. Featuring portraits of jazz greats and drawings of their houses, this pictorial map makes a beautiful poster. The back of the map contains a short history of jazz in Queens; the addresses of homes once occupied by jazz musicians; and sites of current interest to jazz fans.
Each CultureMap explores a specific New York City neighborhood, focusing on the people and places that have made that neighborhood famous. The front side of each publication features a beautifully illustrated pictorial map done by a well-known artist. The backsides provide the itinerary for a neighborhood walking tour that has been carefully researched by a team of educators. CultureMaps are designed for scholars, tourists, locals, students and others interested in history and culture. The maps are available in both a folded format and as unfolded posters suitable for framing.
Description from Publisher
Nonfiction
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Gina By Bernard Waber |
With a lively rhyming text and energetic line-and-watercolor pictures, the author and illustrator of Ira Says Goodbye (1988) offers another book about moving. When Gina moves to an apartment in Queens, there are no girls her age in the neighborhood. Just boys everywhere. At first she's lonely, but she loves sports, and when she shows that she can slam the ball right over third base, she's part of the crowd. Still, she clings to her dream "of someday seeing other girls play on her team." The story's a bit purposive, but Waber has fun with names and rhymes ("Yusuf, Yakov, Laird, and Sonny. If it weren't so weird, it could have been funny" ). The pictures show that the guys on the street may all be boys, boys galore on every floor, but they come in all shapes and sizes, colors and crews.
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How Pizza Came to Queens By Dayal Kaur Khalsa |
An Italian visitor to Queens bemoans the unavailability of pizza until some thoughtful girls enable her to make some.
May, of My Family Vacation , is staying with her good friends Linda, Judy and Peggy Penny while her parents are away. The Penny family is visited by a distant cousin, elderly Mrs. Pelligrini, who walks through the kitchen door, sniffs the air and immediately declares, ``Is no good.'' The girls notice that the only time the elderly visitor is really happy is when she is cooking, and they all wonder about the mysterious ``pizza'' that Mrs. Pelligrini misses so much. ``Maybe it's her daughter . . . '' says one of the girls. ``Or her dog,'' ventures another. When the girls learn, at the library, the meaning of the word pizza, they copy the list of ingredients and then go shopping. Mrs. Pelligrini, seeing the items the girls have assembled, flies into action, and soon the house is filled with the aroma of the bubbling, baking pie. This amusing story is embellished with Khalsa's intensely colored paintings in her vigorous primitive style, each one brimming with details of family life a few decades ago. The delicious-looking endpapers depict pizza pies falling from a beautiful blue sky. Can you imagine the world B. P. (before pizza)? When Mrs. Pelligrino visits relatives in a quiet Queens (New York) neighborhood c. 1950, local knowledge of Italian language and cuisine is limited to spaghetti, macaroni, and lasagna. Their glum visitor speaks little English, so the children try without much success both to cheer her up and to understand her reiterated complaint: ``No pizza!'' Finally the girls do a bit of research, and then buy the necessary ingredients. Mrs. Pelligrino is ecstatic and unwraps the rolling pin that she has been cradling. The children are skeptical--their reaction to the recipe had been ``Yuk''--but the finished product thrills everyone. Khalsa's paintings are also satisfying: a wide range of flat, bright colors in her naive style conveys the cheerful simplicity of a lost Eden. The jacket illustration, a smiling Mrs. P. and her four young friends whirling dough aloft, and the pizza-in-the-sky endpapers are particularly successful. Culinary historians may question this version of pizza's advent (and the text might have been shorter), but, like its subject, this product should appeal to popular tastes. The story is wonderful. It takes place at some unidentified time in the past (probably late 40s or early 50s), when an elderly Italian relative, Mrs. Pellegrino, pays a visit to Queens and is disappointed to discover there's no pizza there -- but she doesn't speak English well enough to explain what pizza is. The children she visits want to make her happy, so they do everything they can to find out what pizza is so they can get one for Mrs. Pellegrino. They finally find the answer in the library (using a dictionary and then a cookbook), and buy all the ingredients, thinking all the while that a PIE made with TOMATOES sounds disgusting. To say the least, they get a pleasant surprise. It's a funny and charming story, but it's a lot more than that, too. I think it's very important for children to learn to appreciate other cultures, and a book showing that their favorite food has not been in this country forever, but came over with immigrants, is a great way to help them see foreign cultures and people in a positive way. The children in the story are also great role models. The find Mrs. Pellegrino odd (her difficulty with English even makes her seem a little mean at first), but they are able to put aside their feelings and try to help her feel at home. And they're rewarded for their kindness with their first taste of pizza Ð now there's a reward most kids can appreciate. |
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Lily's Crossing By Patricia Reilly Giff |
Awards:
Elizabeth Mollahan--the Lily of Lily's Crossing--lost her mom when she was little. Her father and a grandmother are her only family. Every summer the three of them flee sweaty New York City for a beach house in New York's Rockaways.
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6-321 By Michael Laser |
Sixth grade is a watershed year for Marc Chaikin, a student in Queens, NY in the 1960s. "In just two months I fell in love, watched my family break into pieces, and came this close to getting beat to a pulp...not to mention meeting Mickey Mantle..." Author Laser drew on his own experiences in writing this, as he relates in an afterword, and the well-written story rings true in its careful detailing of Marc's varied experiences. He's afraid of his new teacher at first, but comes to appreciate the man's high standards, and similarly comes to see his love interest, a shy girl who longs to be wild, in a new light. As his parents' relationship deteriorates, and everything around him changes, Marc realizes that he can change also, and he learns to speak out when it matters. This is a heartfelt tale that succeeds in conveying Marc's story while touching on universal themes. For younger YAs in middle school and upper elementary grades.
Marc Chaikin's life has always been stable and steady but he is about to discover hatred and first love. Marc and his friends in 6-321 (the highest academic class) are being bullied by the students in 6-309 (the lowest academic achievers) and anger and hostility are escalating. Meanwhile, he is fighting the most popular boy in class for the affection of Lily Wu, his idea of the perfect girl. On the day of the agreed "big fight," President Kennedy is shot, and priorities suddenly change. Written in a direct style, and set within the narrow confines of Queens, NY, in 1963, this coming-of-age story subtly draws readers in. Laser's uncomplicated language allows his theme about image and expectation to come through clearly. |
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The Queens Jazz Trail Map and Walking Tour By Ephemera Press |
While New Orleans may boast that it is the "birthplace of jazz," New York City's borough of Queens has its own proud claim: it has been the "home of jazz," the residence of choice for hundreds of the music's leading players. The award winning Queens Jazz Trail map (originally commissioned by Flushing Town Hall) shows the different neighborhoods and sites that are part of this hidden jazz history. Featuring portraits of jazz greats and drawings of their houses, this pictorial map makes a beautiful poster. The back of the map contains a short history of jazz in Queens; the addresses of homes once occupied by jazz musicians; and sites of current interest to jazz fans.
Each CultureMap explores a specific New York City neighborhood, focusing on the people and places that have made that neighborhood famous. The front side of each publication features a beautifully illustrated pictorial map done by a well-known artist. The backsides provide the itinerary for a neighborhood walking tour that has been carefully researched by a team of educators. CultureMaps are designed for scholars, tourists, locals, students and others interested in history and culture. The maps are available in both a folded format and as unfolded posters suitable for framing. |
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