Fireworks by Matthew Burgess illustrated by Catia Chien

My dad loved the fireworks here in Sydney every New Year. He would either want to head into the city or locally there was a small hill where people gathered. When I was a young child we walked through a harborside suburb to a vantage point opposite our iconic Sydney Harbour Bridge. I even remember walking in the dark with my cousins, and I remember the special clothes I was wearing!

In this story, Fireworks, it is a very hot summer day. The two kids cool off under a fire hydrant and then they head to the park where they enjoy huge watermelon slices. 

Grandma cooks their dinner and then the kids climb to the top of their city building. 

"On this summer night, we climb the ricket ladder to the silver tar rooftop still soft from the day's sun and we wait for the first pop!"

It's a fabulous fireworks display and one of the best pages comes at the end where we see the way the colourful images are still exploding in their minds and dreams.

Bookseller blurb: As a hot day sizzles into evening, everyone on stoops and sidewalks looks skyward on this special summer night—the Fourth of July! Words and art blossom into flowers of fire across the sky, making this a perfect read for firework enthusiasts in cities and suburbs everywhere.

Is this book about the 4th of July - probably - but that's okay. We have fabulous fireworks here in Australia on New Year's Eve and at other times so really this story does translate very easily across the world. I have put some of other picture books that include fireworks at the bottom of this post. Betsy Bird also talks about this book being a book about summer heat and my own favourite US book on that topic is Come on Rain by Karen Hesse. Fireworks is set in New York city but that's okay too - our kids know about that city and others like it with tall buildings and large parks.

Think about the wonderful words your library group or young reading companion will encounter in this book: greet; venture; steamy; bodega; sax (saxophone); onlookers; salsa; rickety; finale; charcoal sniff; extinguished; and lull.

Bodega - that's a word you may not know. It is a small Spanish speaking grocery store.

Fireworks contains a gatefold - Besty Bird explains this: Let’s say you’re a children’s book author or illustrator and you wanted to put a gatefold into your book. A gatefold is a spread of pages that physically open up outside of the confines of the book’s dimensions in some manner. Historically, librarians have not been huge fans of gatefolds because they have a tendency to rip over time. What makes the gatefold in “Fireworks” so extraordinary is that it’s vertical rather than horizontal. It also tucks so perfectly into the book that it might take an adult reader a couple seconds before they realize it’s even there. Only the thickness of the paper gives away its presence. Now here’s the kicker: Did you know that a gatefold can only appear in a book at just the right moment? Because of the physical nature of how books are made (the folding of the pages together) gatefolds can only come at certain moments. So part of what’s so amazing about this book is that its gatefold comes at precisely the right moment, both physically and from a literary perspective. It’s a marvel of simultaneous engineering and storytelling.

If you share this book with a group of older readers in grades 4-6 please take the time to talk about pace and word placement - the final page turn and final word of this book is sure to have been one of the many reasons Fireworks was selected for this enormously prestigious award.

When you read enough picture books you shouldn’t allow yourself to have favorites. Still, I state loud and clear for the record, that this is without a doubt my favorite firework-related summertime picture book ever. Beautiful, weirdly touching, and utterly original. “Swish Zing Tizzle-ting POOF!”

Take a look at the book trailer on the author web page.

Read some reviews:

Kirkus Star review

Horn Book

Waking Brain Cells

You can see more books illustrated by Catia Chien here and here is the web page for Matthew Burgess. I previously talked about The Bear and the Moon;

Betsy mentions that there should be more books about fireworks. My friend from Kinderbookswitheverything shared a few in her blog post. I remembered a book from my former library which was regularly requested by our art teacher but sadly I cannot find a cover image to share here. This book is from 1983 published by A and C Black - Firework Party by Peggy Blakeley. 

Fireworks is the winner of the 2026 Caldecott Medal and yet here in Australia it is listed at over AUS$53 as the retail price - I have seen it also listed for AUS$38 but even that will be way beyond the budget of every school library her in Australia - why oh why? My friend and I have seen this issue with other Caldecott winners and honor titles - see the bottom of this post for some covers. It is true that some Caldecott titles are not really relevant for our Australian children, but Fireworks (and Watercress) most certainly are. I previously talked about past winners here.

Here two of the 2026 honor titles (there are four in total)

Every Monday Mabel

Watercress and Hot Dog

Awards for Fireworks:

     2026 Caldecott Medal

     Charlotte Zolotow Honor for Outstanding Writing in a Picture Book 

     SCBWI Golden Kite Honor for Picture Book Illustration and Text

     Society of Illustrators Gold Medal 

     A NYT/NYPL Best Illustrated Book

     Kirkus’ Best Books of 2025

     School Library Journal’s Best Books of 2025

     Publisher’s Weekly Best Picture Books of 2025

     Blue Ribbon Award 2025

You can also find fireworks in these:

See inside this book here

Noah's New Home

A Gift for Nana

Hot Dog by Doug Salati

It is a hot day. The dog is hot but luckily his owner has a plan. First they have to navigate the hot and busy city streets. The pavement is so hot and everything is way too noisy and busy. In fact the little dog finally collapses and refuses to walk on. 

Luckily the lady is able to hail a taxi and they travel, slowly, to the train station. Then there is a ferry ride. Their intended destination is the beach so it is lucky that there is a beach umbrella shop right beside the ferry wharf. On the beach the dog is free to run and roll and enjoy the ocean spray. He collects rocks and pebbles and his owner makes a beautiful picture on the sand. Finally, it is time to go home so she gathers the pebbles and the pair of friends retrace their journey by ferry, train and on foot. The city is so much better now that the weather has cooled down. At home they enjoy a snack and then head to bed for a night of sweet dreams. 

My friend from Kinderbookswitheverything has been waiting for this book to arrive in Australia. Hot Dog won the Caldecott Medal in 2023 but until this year the price was way too high for a school library budget. In the US this book was published by Alfred K Knopf but the copy we have here is from Pushkin Press UK.  Now that this book is a good price AUS$25 I highly recommend you consider adding it to your library - a perfect book to read on a very hot summer day.

In Australia we would call this a Sausage Dog but in the US he is a Wiener Dog which you could associate with hot dogs (the food)! Weiner is a German word meaning sausage. 

In this conversation Doug Salati talks to Horn Book. See other books by Doug Salati here.

Salati expertly captures the stifling claustrophobia of hot and crowded city streets. One can almost feel the palpable temperature shift when the colors on the pages move from vibrant oranges, reds, and yellows to blues and greens, like a tonal reprieve. Happily, the book avoids demonizing cities in favor of the country, showing instead how a bad day affects your every sense. Spare poetic text also perfectly captures this small canine’s mindset. Kirkus Star review

Practically a wordless book, the storyline delves deep into the mindset of an average dog, an average owner, and the cool seaside breezes that can pivot a day from miserable to marvelous. ... For my part, the thing that struck me about the book right from the get go was the way in which you empathize with this little dog. You feel the heat that it’s experiencing. The loud sounds. The crowded streets. Is it possible to convey sensory overload through the printed page? If so, Salati has mastered it. SLJ Betsy Bird. (Click this review extract to see Doug Salati talking about his book)

Minimal, impressionistic free-verse text beautifully sets scenes and conveys character and emotion, expertly matched by the illustrations. Claustrophobic vertical panels, angular lines, and hot oranges, reds, and yellows (of the city) give way to expansive, sometimes full-spread horizontal panels and cool blues and greens (of the island escape). Horn Book

When I read Hot Dog I thought of this very old book:

Summer Blue by Trudie Trewin illustrated by Marjorie Crosby-Fairall

Blurb and opening lines: "Marley and Moses lived in a place where the heat crept up and smothered the days in stiffing stillness. And it stayed and stayed."

On Monday the children try to play outside in their tree using grandma's fan as a way to try to keep cool. On Tuesday they spend time at the creek which has almost no water. On Wednesday they fill watering cans and take turns under the cascading water and so the week continues until the sky grows dark on Friday.

"Marley and Moses lived in a place where the rain, when it came, wasn't cold pin rain you had to run and hide from. It was fat, juicy 'come and play' rain."

Every child and adult runs outside to play and frolic and dance in the rain ... which "when it came, stayed and stayed."

There are many meanings to be inferred from the title – summer blue sky, summer blues/mood, and the dark blue of the sky when the rain is coming.

When you pick up this book flip it over and notice the contrasting front and back covers and then turn to the front and back end papers. They are splendid. Of course, there are other books about heat, summer, drought etc here in Australia which end with glorious rain but I think this book is a worthy addition to the cannon. I am thinking of books such as Mallee sky by Jodi Toering, Two Summers by John Heffernan, and Drought by Jackie French. The point of difference here is audience. 

This book is perfect to share with younger children. Summer Blue contains carefully crafty lyrical language and phrases – smothered the days in stifling stillness and heavy with heat and fabulous verbs linked to heat and water such as melted, dissolved, evaporated, oozed and poured. 

You can feel the cool water in the illustration where Marley tips the watering can over her head. The sense of place and time are very strong in this book. The motif of the fan works well when finally, it is so hot the pair of children cannot even share this tiny cooling device. 

I love the way the story ends with the rain still falling – this will open up some excellent discussions about weather, drought and floods with younger children and climate change with older students. The enormity of the arrival of the rain is mirrored by the way the whole landscape is shown using a birds eye view on the double spread where the sky turns black, grey and indigo. The digital illustrations have a beautiful soft almost nostalgic focus and there is a perfect shift in the colour palette from the hot summer and yellow grasses to the purples, blues and aqua tones of the rain filled pages. There is a wonderful change of mood capturing the joy and renewed energy of the children as they frolic in rain puddles and the mud. The ways the animals react to the weather and environment is also engaging and appealing – and very realistic.

The weather explored in this book is common in Australia - drought and rain - but the landscape depicted by Marjorie Crosby-Fairall is interesting. It does look Australian in some ways but the scenes also have a more universal feel possibly because they are painted with using a soft focus. Reading this book with a group of children it would be important to talk about safety - alerting your group to the potential dangers of playing in flood waters although in this book the water does look very shallow. Venturing into flood waters is a huge concern in country areas where so many little children, and adults too, misread the depth and treachery of heavy rain and floods. 

Summer Blue is a 2023 Children's Book Council of Australia CBCA notable title. You can see inside this book here. Take a look at other books illustrated by Marjorie Crosby-Fairall and for Trudie Trewin. 

Some years ago I started a collection of books that use the pattern of days of the week and while this is not a major focus of this story it is an interesting story device you could explore with young writers. 

Companion books:

All I want for Christmas is Rain

Rain for Christmas

It's a Miroocool

Sing me the Summer by Jane Godwin illustrated by Alison Lester

"Sing me the summer

The sparkling sea

Our buckets and spades on the sand.

Shells by the rock pools

where tiny fish swim

and a crab scuttles over my hand."

Affirm Press have a wonderful video on their web site where Alison Lester shows in great detail the process she used to illustrate this book. It is especially interesting to see Jane Godwin's original text typed over a couple of pages. On this page Jane talks about her text and collaboration with Alison.

When you explore this book with a group of young children be sure to grab all the copies you can find of other books by Alison Lester. In Sing me the Summer you are sure to spy Noni the Pony; Bigsy; and the night time sky from Kissed by the Moon. I'm also sure many of the children have appeared in the series that began with Clive eats Alligators and also the little family in Are we there Yet? I found a Pinterest filled with images from Alison's work.

If you have a music teacher in your school it would be fabulous to set the words of this rhyming story to music. You could easily develop this story into a vibrant class item for a school assembly or other event.

Stories with repeated refrains work so well with preschool children and, whether you are reading to a group or just one little friend, everyone is sure to anticipate the words as you turn the page:

Here is the day ...  and here is the night.

This book would make a beautiful gift for a child living overseas. You will find  references to Australia such as wattle; paddock; gum trees; and roos. I am pleased to see there is no snow on the winter scenes while we do have a little snow in Australia the majority of the population do not see snow during the winter.

A huge amount of work has gone into the book design of Sing me the Summer. The end papers are covered with colourful leaves and show a subtle difference between night and day. The cover has embossed lettering. I love the way it feels. And the landscape format allows Alison to stretch her bright and lively illustrations right across two pages giving a full view of the beach; a outdoor birthday party; sunset on bonfire night; and camping out under the stars on a warm summer night.

If you have ever wanted to own a glorious illustration by Alison Lester take a look at the Melbourne based company Books Illustrated.