You Can't Take A Balloon into the Museum of Fine Arts by Jacqueline Preiss Weitzman, illustrated by Robin Preiss Glasser tells two stories in one: A sister and brother visit  the Museum of Fine Arts with Grandpa, while Grandma watches the little girl's green balloon outside. But the balloon blows away and causes an uproar at every major Boston tourist attraction. The book is recommended for children age 4 and up, but since it is a wordless picture book I think children much younger can enjoy it too. My two-year-old likes to look at the pictures and talk about what the balloon is doing. Older kids will love recognizing familiar landmarks in the gorgeous illustrations and may even notice the way the illustrations of the balloon's adventures mimic the art the children are looking at in the museum.

Busing Brewster by Richard Michelson and illustrated by R. G. Roth, was named a Best Children's Illustrated Book by the New York Times Book Review. The book tells the story of a young African-American boy named Brewster who is starting first grade the year Boston Public Schools started busing to integrate the city schools. While the text is simple and the pictures eye-catching, this is a book best read with older children (Amazon recommends ages 6-10, but I doubt most fifth graders are interested in picture books). Brewster and his brother face angry white protestors, have a rock thrown at their bus, and endure many racist comments from white students and their parents. The book is therefore best for kids who are old enough to understand and discuss racism and social change.

If you love singing "What would you do with a drunken sailor?" but just don't feel comfortable singing it with your kids, Goin' to Boston: An Exuberant Journey in Song is the book for you. An arrangement of an old Appalachian folk song by H. Ellen Margolin and illustrated by Emily Bolam with the same tune as the better known sea shanty, Goin' To Boston will having you singing "Don't we look pretty on the Common?" all day long. The illustrations represent an unspecified old-fashioned era when people traveled by donkey or bicycle as much as by car and danced around a maypole in the Common. My only complaint is that the final illustration depicts people watching sail boats--perhaps on the Esplanade?-- even though the words are referencing the Common. The illustration echoes A Sunday afternoon on the Island of la Grande Jatte – 1884  by Georges Seurat, which is neat, but seems out of place in the story.

Molasses Flood by Blair Lent introduces young children to one of the more bizarre facts of Boston history: the 1919 Molasses Flood. The flood in this story is much less disastrous than the actual one: no one is killed or injured. Little Charlie Owen Muldoon rides his house like a boat on the tide of molasses calling "The molasses is coming! The molasses is coming!" a la Paul Revere. In the end, the only harm done is that some of the houses end up far from where they started (which the narrator notes is not a big deal since Boston streets were confusing to begin with), and Charley gets tired of eating molasses with every meal after salvaging it from the flooded streets.