The Empire State Center for the Book has selected Melissa Sweet’s Balloons Over Broadway (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) to represent New York State at the 2014 National Book Festival in Washington DC.  The book is the state’s selection for the National Book Festival’s “Discover Great Places Through Reading Map”. Each state selects one title of fiction or non-fiction, a book about the state or by an author from the state, that is a good read for children or young adults. The map is distributed at the Pavilion of the States at the Festival and listed in “Great Reads About Great Places”.

Everyone’s a New Yorker on Thanksgiving Day, when young and old rise early to see what giant new balloons will fill the skies for Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. “In this book, Melissa Sweet brings to life a New York and national institution, the Thanksgiving Parade and the man who was responsible for the parade’s balloons, Tony Sarg.”

The selection will be formally recognized at the New York State Writers Hall of Fame Induction on June 3rd where, Nora Efron, Russell Banks, Mary Higgins Clark, and Alice Hoffman, among others, will be inducted during a gala dinner held at the Princeton Club of New York.

The National Book Festival will be held in Washington DC on Saturday, August 30, 2014. It will feature award-winning authors, poets, and illustrators at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center which will be organized by categories of literature. Festival goers can meet and hear firsthand from their favorite authors, get books signed, have photos taken with mascots and storybook characters, and participate in a variety of learning activities. States will be promoting reading and library programs and literary events.

For the list of books chosen in previous years, click here.