Despite your protestations, your Newbery picks this time around did very well! Brown Girl Dreaming didn't take the top prize, but it was named a Newbery Honor Book, along with the marvelous El Deafo. You've got skills!
Our house has been a whirlwind of birthday celebrations and fevers for the last couple of weeks, and I've been feeling a little overwhelmed. Happily, our regular guest blogger and new mom Emily has some thoughts about several Brooklyn-themed baby books that have entered her life since the arrival of her daughter Alice. Here she is:
A realtor gave us a copy of Brooklyn Baby, by Lisa McKeon, which has quickly become
one of my eight month old daughter Alice’s favorite board books. Both of us love
illustrator Violet Lemay’s busy, happy streetscapes featuring familiar food carts and
subway signs. I also love the silly local touches. “Brooklyn baby, now it’s time to go
to sleep,” instructs the last page. High up in an apartment window, a little Brooklyn
baby responds with a big “Fuhgeddaboudit!!” 
Alice is still too young for books she can’t eat, but when she can handle paper pages she has a lot of local options ahead of her. In Homer the Little Stray Cat by Pam Laskin, a scruffy street cat finds a home in the arms of a Brooklyn boy named Adam. Reluctant about having such a yowly new addition, Adam’s parents are won over by the ways Homer draws their shy son out. One of the more endearing aspects of this story is that Kirsi Tuomenan Hill’s illustrations present Adam’s interracial family without making them the center of the story.
We discovered Mermaids on Parade at a public library sing-a-long when the author Melanie Hope Greenberg stopped in [Note: Mermaids is also a huge hit at our house, introduced to us by our guest blogger Denise] . With bright, pastel illustrations featuring all sorts of costumed characters, Greenberg tells the story of a young girl’s trip to the Mermaid parade amid lavish descriptions of Coney Island’s steamy summer electricity.
It almost goes without saying that Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale, by the inimitable Mo Willems, is a total gem. Against photographed backdrops of brownstone stoops, a bespectacled cartoon dad makes an alarming discovery during a trip to the laundromat with his daughter. This one is wonderful to read out loud, filled as it is with onomatopoeic kid language – “’Aggle flaggle klabble!’ said Trixie again” – and the flustered, outer-borough dad is completely recognizable.
I suspect it will be fun for Alice to see her world of brownstone stoops and corner laundromats - a world that would have been unrecognizable to me as a suburban kid - reflected in the books she reads as she grows up.
Emily
I'm sure it will. More from our crazy house soon.
Love, Annie
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