By Melissa Sweet
The true story of Tony Sarg, the puppeteer who realized that if a marionette can be worked from above with strings, a balloon could be worked from below with poles. That flip is why giant animals float over the Macy's Thanksgiving parade every year.
Tony Sarg was a boy in Germany who rigged a rope-and-pulley contraption so he could feed the chickens without getting out of bed, and he spent the rest of his life doing versions of the same trick. He grew up into a puppeteer, moved to New York, and made the mechanical windows that stopped traffic outside Macy's at Christmas. When the store asked him for a parade, he built one, and when the live zoo animals in it frightened the children, he had to solve the problem another way. So he turned a marionette upside down. Instead of strings pulling it down from above, poles pushed it up from below, and the whole puppet was filled with helium. Melissa Sweet built the pictures out of Tony Sarg's actual world, papier-mâché puppets she made herself, old toys, found objects, cut paper, a 1929 book about his marionettes, the front page of the New York Times from 1933. It won the Sibert Medal, which is the award for the best informational book of the year.
It's a problem book, and the problem is one your child has probably already watched on television without wondering about it once. Sarg keeps hitting a wall and going sideways, which is what makes it useful for a child who thinks being clever means knowing the answer straight away. But the reason it works as a book about finding things out is the art. Sweet didn't draw Tony Sarg's world, she built her pictures out of pieces of it, and then she tells you at the back exactly which pieces and where she got them. Your child can see the evidence and the story in the same picture.