Trading Places: A New Home by Tania de Regil

Moving from a loved home is hard. Two kids, happy in their homes in their familiar hometowns, get unsettling news.

With the Empire State building and New York skyline visible through his window, a surprised boy looks up from his toys.

Mom and Dad told me that we are moving to Mexico City.

With a golden monument and far, snow-tipped mountains in view, a girl sits in front of her large window with tropical flower all around.

Mama' and Papa' told me that we are moving to New York City.

Both kids wonder if they will find something like the same friendly and familiar places they love in their new homes.

... listening to my favorite song on my way to school...

Both children recall waving to a familiar sidewalk busker (saxophonist and street organ) on their way out in the morning.

... getting something delicious to eat on my way home in the afternoon...

Both think of stopping for a snack at their favorite sidewalk vendors.

In Tania de Regil's A New Home (Candlewick Press, 2019), author-illustrator Tania De Regil ironically shows her characters in their different-but-the-same activities, sharing the big game (baseball and futbol') with the crowd in big stadiums, ice skating and biking in their iconic outdoor places--Central Park and Bosque de Chepultepec, visiting their respective famous museums and negotiating the noisy crossings in Times Square and the Anillo Periferico around Mexico City.

De Regil's engaging side-by-side illustrations, done in bright mixed media (gouache, colored pencil, watercolors) picture some of the famous sights of each city with which the two young travelers will soon become familiar. And in a charming closing illustration, we see the two children smile at each other in the airport as they pass, trading home places in this story of familiar and foreign places and finding a home in a new city. De Regil also adds an appendix of thumbnail illustrations of scenes in both big cities of the famous places that will soon become familiar to both. This is a different book about relocating, one that involves changing countries and climates, a story about places that are different but alike, with all the inevitable but familiar feelings about moving to a new home."De Regil’s reassuring ode to one’s beloved home acknowledges both the flaws and vibrancy of the two places and encourages children to be brave and open-minded about moving," observes Horn Book.

No Place Like Home: The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street by Karina Yan Glaser

In the middle of a quiet block on 141st Street, inside a brownstone made of deep red shale, the Vanderbeeker family gathered for a family meeting. Papa adjusted his glasses. "You kids know how much Mama and I love you, right?"

Oliver, who was nine years old and wise in the ways of the world, squinted. "Are you guys getting divorced?"

"No, we're--" Papa began. "Is it true?" six-year-old Hyacinth whispered, tears pooling in her round eyes. "Of course, we're--" Mama said.

"What's a dorce?" interrupted Laney, who was four and three quarters. "STOP!" Mama threw up her hands. "Papa and I are not getting a divorce!" Papa stood up. His face was so grim that his ever-present smile creases disappeared. "I didn't see this coming, but Mr. Beiderman's not renewing our lease."

"What's a lease?" asked Laney.

Things have never been great between the lively Vanderbeeker kids and their curmudgeonly landlord. From the moment he'd screamed when the then six-year-old Isa had played her first violin solo, "Twinkle Twinkle" in front of his always closed door, the children knew The Beiderman wished they would leave. It didn't help when their dog Franz used his door for a fire hydrant, or when Oliver hit a baseball through his window and practiced dribbling his basketball loudly on the sidewalk in front of the brownstone. But Hyacinth had learned to walk Franz outside and Isa had practiced violin in the basement for years, and Oliver always played ball at the park now. They had tried hard, but now Beiderman is just a mean old hermit who is ruining Christmas and making them move from the only home they'd ever known.

The kids called their own meeting. They had only eleven days to save their home.

They decided that they would just have to try to win Mr. Beiderman over. But a surprise breakfast, with fresh bread and pastries from Castleman's Bakery, winds up a dropped mess in front of his door when Jessie sees his angry eyeball glaring at her through the peephole.

"Total... failure," she sobs to her siblings.

Hyacinth decides to try a holiday gift, a hand-stitched placemat in Christmasy colors and with Franz on his leash and on his best behavior, she heads upstairs to knock on Beiderman's door.

Hyacinth trembled as she stood before a monster of a man with shaggy, dark hair. His face was pale and lifeless. He was wearing black, black, black. "Leave me alone! Move out of here and let me be!" he bellowed.

The children decide to collect signatures from all their neighborhood friends on a petition to Mr. Beiderman to let them stay in the brownstone. As they talk to the neighbors, they learn that there is a sad story of the tragic loss of his own family behind Mr. Beiderman's seclusion. But when the landlord sees the petition, he angrily calls their parents, who order the kids to apologize to Mr. Beiderman.

Hyacinth picks a little black kitten from the litter mother cat Francesca Priscilla Arlington is raising under the hydrangea bush in the backyard, and wrapping her own rainbow knitted shawl around the kitten and placing him in a box, she steals up to leave the kitten at Beiderman's door, knocks, and races downstairs.

But as it began with Isa and her violin, the feud ends dramatically, with Isa, playing "The Swan" outside Beiderman's door, in Karina Yan Glaser's charming family novel, The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017).

Each of the Vanderbecker kids is a distinct individual with whom different readers may identify, and their varied, funny, messy, and loving lives, although set in the present, have the nostalgic ambiance of family classics, from that favorite of yesteryear, Five Little Peppers and How They Grew (Dover Children's Classics), to All-of-a-Kind Family to The Moffats and more recently, The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy (see reviews here.) A story of a bitter, lonely man and a family sorrowfully facing the loss of their home, friends, and familiar neighborhood is a great holiday book for middle readers, an affirmation of the importance of an affectionate and tolerant family, a warm home, and a close-knit and caring multicultural community within a big city. Readers are going to be left longing for more stories of the Vanderbeekers from 141st Street.

Taking a Bite of the Big Apple! Angelina's Big City Ballet by Katharine Holabird

ANGELINA WAS ON HER WAY TO MOST FAMOUS CITY IN MOUSELAND.

"WOW! I'VE ALWAYS WANTED TO SEE THE BIG CHEESE!" SHE SAID.

ANGELINA WAS GOING TO PERFORM AT THE BIG CHEESE DANCE SHOW WITH HER COUSIN JEANIE.

Aunt Violet and Jeanie are there to meet them when the S.S Mousetania docks and to whisk them away in one of those famous yellow cabs to their downtown apartment. Angelina is dazzled by everything. She's never seen an elevator or someone's home on the tenth floor. Soon they are off on a whirlwind tour of the Big City sights--Parmesan Park Avenue and the Empire Cheddar Building! I'm not in Chipping Cheddar anymore, Angelina thinks to herself.

But it's not long before Cousin Jeanie starts talking about their performance. She has it all choreographed in her mind, and she tells Angelina something disturbing!

"TRY MY TAP DANCING! IT'S SO MUCH BETTER THAN BALLET!"

But in the best spirit of "the show must go on," Angelina diplomatically suggests to her cousin that perhaps they can pool their talents and come up with a unique two-way routine to wow the crowd, in Katharine Holabird's newest Angelina Ballerina saga, Angelina's Big City Ballet (Angelina Ballerina) (Penguin Group, 2014).  Holabird's text handles this danseuse dilemma with her usual empathetic writerly footwork, and Helen Craig's delicate pastel watercolor illustrations fairly sparkle, as the mouse cousins face the footlights in their fancy flapper costumes and deliver a stellar retro routine that brings the crowd to their feet.  Jeanie and Angelina are the toast of  Big Cheese Town as Angelina, still a ballerina, sails for home, a star of the Great Mouse Way.  This Angelina tale has a delightful dose of la danse for young ballet fans, especially in the season of The Nutcracker.

In Another Universe...: The Inquisitor's Apprentice by Chris Moriarty

The day Sacha learned that he could see witches was the worst day in his life.

The disaster at Mrs. Lassky''s bakery turned Sacha's life completely upside down. Before the month was up, he was yanked out of school, dragged away from all his friends and subjected to every standardized aptitude test the New York City Police Department could throw at him.

Sacha Kessler's pre-World War I New York is a doppelganger, an alternate-universe parallel to the one we know, one in which magic, though illegal, is rampant--from Jewish bakery ladies who concoct lattkes with spells to attract husbands to the malevolent magical machinations of J. P. Morgaunt, the magnate who plans to finagle his wizardly powers into control of the nation's financial system. Familiar figures populate the city--millionaires Cornelius Vanderbilk and John Jacob Astral, ultra-wealthy Wizards of Wall Street, Harry Houdini at the height of his career as the Great Illusionist, Teddy Roosevelt, exiled for prosecuting the dark magic magnates, and Thomas Alva Edison, who, having invented electric lights and the phonograph, is perfecting and markieting his magic detector, the Etherograph,

Sacha soon finds himself an apprentice to Maximillian Wolf, Chief Inquisitor of the NYPD, whose disheveled appearance hides the powers of a great mage. His unlikely fellow apprentice is Lily Astral, daughter of the incredibly wealthy financier John Jacob Astral, whom Sacha is sure at best is a hopeless snob. But events don't allow Sacha and Lily time to get to know each other before they are involved in an attempted murder of Thomas Edison by what Sacha knows has to be a dybbuk, a wraith-like creature of black magic which progressively becomes stronger as it steals the persona and ultimately the soul of its victim. And Sacha begins to suspect to his horror that, while the dybbuk is being directed by some evil wizard to destroy Edison, the soul and body he is trying to possess is his own!

Sacha knows from dybbuks. His grandfather is himself a rabbi and what's more a Kabbalist, the field of Jewish theology most knowledgeable about the dark arts, and Sacha fears that to tell Inspector Wolf what he knows will send his family to prison for illegal magic. But the dybbuk comes nearer and nearer, stealing Sacha's clothes and looking more and more like him as it continues to shadow him, until finally, in a sensational theatrical showdown between Harry Houdini's illusionist powers and Edison's Etherograph, Sacha realizes that he is the only one who can stop the dybbuk, controlled by J. P. Morgaunt, from assassinating Thomas Edison on stage before a enraptured audience.

Sophisticated young readers may find a familiar plotline in Chris Moriarty's forthcoming The Inquisitor's Apprentice (Harcourt, 2011)--definite parallels to the Harry Potter saga. Sacha seems an ordinary poor Jewish boy from a struggling family on the Lower East Side tenements when he is snatched out of that life and set down, in the company of a smart and assertive girl, as apprentices to their mentor, himself a great wizard in his own right. But this is no fantasy Hogwarts world. It's almost the old New York we know, with its myriad of immigrants, a vast difference between rich and poor, and all the familiar racial, religious, and class prejudices we recognize. But this New York has a magical underpinning, and like Harry, Sacha has to struggle to save himself from being absorbed into its Dark Side.

Moriarty's New York is just as dirty and elegant and on-the-make a setting as it is in non-fantasy novels, and his characters are fully fleshed out, from the feisty Lily who fears becoming an idle social climber like her mother to Max Wolf, who walks a moral tightrope between good and evil magic in his daily life, to a main character whose special powers attract the dark forces which would subvert him to wicked, world-changing ends.

Forget all those myth-based monster-a-minute fantasies. This one is the real deal.

"A marvelous, mystical romp that doesn't ignore reality," says Kirkus Reviews.

Larry Bites the Big Apple: Larry Gets Lost in New York City by Michael Mullin

THERE WAS NO ROOM FOR TRAIN TRACKS ON THE SURFACE, SO THE FAMILY BOUGHT TICKETS AND WENT UNDERGROUND.

FROM THE TRAIN LARRY LUNGED FOR A TRIANGLE-SHAPED SNACK.

QUITE SURE HE COULD EAT IT IN TIME TO GET BACK, HE GRABBED IT AND CHOMPED, SENDING CHEESE INTO THE AIR.

THEN LARRY HEARD A LOUD WHOOOOOOSH! AND SAW PETE WASN'T THERE!

Larry, the lop-eared pup who has an uncanny knack for getting himself lost in big cities, is at it again, this time dashing through the subway door to retrieve a dropped pizza slice from the platform, only to hear the automated door close and watch the subway, with Pete peering mournfully out the back window, recede into the tunnel.

But Larry is a plucky pooch, and he sets out to find Pete in the wilds of Manhattan, in the course of which young readers are taken on a guided tour of the iconic sights of New York City. Lost Larry races through Grand Central Station, the United Nations flag court, Rockefeller Center, Central Park, the Empire State Building, Times Square, the Metropolitan Museum, MOMA, Yankee Station, and all the those famous scenes, as Pete and family pursue him uptown and downtown, until at last the wayward canine catches a lucky break, a sympathetic face among the madding Manhattan masses:

HE SAW A YOUNG GIRL TYING HER LACES.

LARRY GAVE HER ONE OF HIS "I'M LOST. HELP ME!" FACES.

HER MOM PATTED HIS HEAD AND CHECKED HIS ID.

"NOW I'LL FIND PETE." LARRY THOUGHT. "LUCKY ME!"

AND FIND HIM HE DID.

Larry's happy-go-lucky owners never seem to learn that they should leash Larry or leave him at home when they vacation, but Larry's temporary loss is our gain, giving us the opportunity to see the sights of big cities, and Michael Mullin's latest, Larry Gets Lost in New York City, (Sasquatch Books, 2010) is a wonderful beginner's tour of the Big Apple. Larry travels in almost every known form of transport, from yellow taxicabs to the Staten Island Ferry and hits all the hot spots for out-of-town tourists, with informational sidebars on most pages adding the fascinating facts about each place. The lost-dog adventure ties together the travelogue in a plot which goes down well for early elementary readers, while artist John Skews provides the reader with a pup's-eye view of the Empire City which provides the opportunity for a variety of perspectives which add visual interest to the 1950s-style watercolored drawings of those familiar New York vistas. For families planning to take in the big city or for early elementary classes studying New York as an archetype of urban areas, this large-format picture book has the goods on Gotham City.

Other books in the "lost Larry" series include Larry Gets Lost in San Francisco, Larry Gets Lost in Los Angeles, Larry Gets Lost in Chicago, and Larry Gets Lost in Seattle. Maybe the series finale for this one will be Larry Gets a GPS! 'Till then it's a treat to take in the major metropolises with Larry.