Review of the Day: Fireworks by Matthew Burgess, ill. Cátia Chien

Fireworks
By Matthew Burgess
Illustrated by Cátia Chien
Clarion (an imprint of Harper Collins)
$19.99
ISBN: 9780063216723
Ages 3-6
On shelves May 13th

Think for a moment of the great picture books about summer. The ones that capture it perfectly. It’s such a subjective thing to ask. For me, the ideal summer picture books are the ones I read as a kid. Books like Ultra-Violet Catastrophe by Margaret Mahy or even A Time to Keep by Tasha Tudor. You probably have your own favorites to draw upon. Of course, summer picture books set in the city are another animal entirely. And summer picture books set specifically in New York City? That makes me think of wonderful titles like Water in the Park by Emily Jenkins or Heatwave by Lauren Redniss. We don’t really have a universal summer city picture book to call upon though, do we? Well, as it just so happens, I have a candidate in mind. It KNOWS summer. It KNOWS New York City. And best of all, it knows how to be interesting to large groups as well as individual readers all at once. Kaboom.

“In the summer, the sun rises between buildings on our block to greet us at breakfast.” Two kids (siblings perhaps?) document what the day looks like for them. It’s summertime, and that means “steamy city sidewalks,” fire hydrant sprays, “bubble cheeks blowing brassy blasts that make us onlookers dance,” watermelon slices, salsa, and so much more. But the best is yet to come. Tonight is a special summer night. The two kids climb to the roof of their building and wait. And soon enough… fire erupts in the sky! Fireworks (though never named) begin their incredible show. By the time it’s all done, the two return to their room and their bed, “between cool sheets… to be tucked in with summer on our skin.” Kaboom.

Is it a Fourth of July book? Not specifically, but you just KNOW that’s when it’s going to get pulled out by librarians and booksellers nationwide every year for displays. And for good reason too. In general, Fourth of July picture books just… don’t exist. Mosey on over to your local library sometime and peruse the Holiday Book section of the children’s room. You’ll see loads of different Holiday-related titles there, but I guarantee you that you’ll find at least twice as many more Groundhog Day books than July 4th. That’s because it’s a hard topic to tackle. None of this is to say that such books don’t exist. I consider Janet Wong’s Apple Pie 4th of July a pioneer in the field. But books about the fireworks display that accompanies such celebrations… it’s weird, right? By all rights we should have loads of them! They’re kid-centric (for those kids who aren’t susceptible to loud noises), beautiful to see, and the kind of thing a family can attend together. So where are the books celebrating them? A quick Google search displays some… but none can compare to this. Burgess and Chien? They’ve hit on something.

And it’s not just the fact that they’ve discovered a subject too little lauded in the picture book sphere in the past. You know how people ship characters in stories or TV shows or movies? I ship authors and illustrators. Not romantically (ew) but professionally. It’s one of the few times I envy editors. Imagine having the power of combining any author/illustrator combo you want. Kadir Nelson and Christian Robinson. Laura Amy Schlitz and Sophie Blackall. Pedro Martin and Yuyi Morales. The POWER…. the power…. And I could use it to such great effect. I could take illustrators that have never received the texts they deserve and pair them with the authors who have penned the BEST texts… and that’s what we have here. At last. Not that I ever would have come up with this pairing myself. But Matthew Burgess and Cátia Chien? By the magic that imbues only the best of picture books, these two work exceedingly well together. Burgess brings the literary poetry. Chen, the level of creativity and sheer chutzpah a book like this one warrants. Together, they are unstoppable.

Let’s look at Burgess’s language. First off, Burgess makes this book UNAPOLOGETICALLY NYC. It never names the city, but come on. All the clues are there. The fire hydrants that let loose on summer days. Bodegas. Musicians playing the saxophone in the park. The Brooklyn Bridge (that one’s a biggie). And, best of all, creaky fire escapes leading to the roof. Burgess sets the scene, but then he brings another level of introspection to the proceedings. The whole book is written in the present tense, so why is there this prevailing sense of nostalgia on every page? I couldn’t say. What I do know is that I love reading the words of this book. Listen: “On this special summer night, we climb the rickety ladder up up up to the silver tar rooftop, still soft from the day’s sun…” The whole book is like that. Trembling on the cusp of the exciting sky show that will only happen near the story’s end. Burgess’s true talent lies in the fact that he can name his book Fireworks and somehow manage to make you forget all about the premise until the moment of truth appears.

Of course, the best picture book authors leave space for their illustrators to fill in their gaps. Just as Burgess never specifies New York as the location, he doesn’t say much about the characters themselves. We know, from the text, that a grandmother is involved in some way, but that’s it. It’s Chien who brings that second level of pathos to the title. She’s the one who gives these kids a home run entirely by their grandmother and no other adult. It’s Chien who, along with the unnamed genius Art Director of the book, makes the endpapers that vibrant eye-popping fluorescent pink (echoed throughout the book in the art). The two children in the book, who traipse through New York City like it’s their own private playground, are genderless, nameless, and we’re with them every step of the way. Chien has a style that can often be described as “dreamy”, but that’s not the word I’d use to describe this book. Engrossing, maybe. Enchanting, definitely. Using (according to the publication page) “mixed media, including pastels, pencils, paint and scratch board,” it’s fascinating to watch each spread do something completely different from the one that comes before and after it. You might see the kids leaping in the spray of the fire hydrant’s water one moment, then receive a bird’s eye view of a park in the next, followed by an extreme close-up of the two kids eating watermelon in the third. You literally never know where Chien is going to go next when you turn the page, and that’s half the fun!

It all builds to the fireworks themselves, and it’s here that I learned a thing or two recently. 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.

There are so many other aspects of the book that one could discuss. For example, this book straddles a line that can be incredibly difficult for a number of picture books to manage: It is both a lapsit book AND a readaloud for large groups. The fireworks themselves DEMAND to be read out loud. It’s also an ideal summertime read. I mentioned it earlier, but the book that this bears the closest resemblance to, to my mind, has to be Heatwave by Lauren Redniss. I encourage people to read both of them on the coldest of snowy days. You can practically feel the heat emanating from their pages. And can we talk about the book’s ending? Cátia Chien doesn’t just stick the landing. She leaves the readers with a final visual image that’s part Jackson Pollock, part Yayoi Kusama. For me, though, the whole book distills down to that moment when the fireworks have finished and the world is this strange smoky evening land. Or, as Matthew Burgess puts it, “in the air, the sharp charcoal sniff of a thousand matches extinguished.” 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!”

On shelves March 13th

Filed under: Best Books, Best Books of 2025, Review 2025, Reviews