Lost in NYC: A Subway Adventure

Gr 4–7—New York City's quintessential sights and sounds and hustle and bustle are beautifully captured in this exciting graphic novel. Lost in NYC unfolds via multiple adventures. First, there's Pablo, the new kid in school. His smart and resourceful classmate Alicia offers to be his partner on the class field trip to the Empire State Building. The students will be taking the subway there, so before setting off, Mr. Bartle dives into an engrossing history lesson about the Empire State Building and the construction of New York City's subway system. Spiegelman and García Sánchez's set the narrative tone and demonstrate artistic mastery in an opening spread that uses a 3-D-like cartoon effect to illustrate Mr. Bartle and his students sitting atop and inside a map of Manhattan, "dissecting" and going "underground" to explore the subway system beneath. Seamlessly woven into the illustration and text are historical photographs that depict how tunnels and trenches were constructed to build the subway system. The storytelling is kinetic. The text moves along visual lines, following subway platforms that both ascend and descend. This technique is paired with illustrations that evoke the sensations of walking Manhattan's densely crowded and diverse streets. Readers see the stacks of yellow cabs, the buskers singing, the skyscrapers carving corridors of blue sky, and even some famous tags by New York's finest graffiti artists. This a love song to the the city that never sleeps as well as a solid friendship story. Paired with robust, detailed historical notes and an engaging Spanish translation by Moral, this book is sure to be a hit with kids and their adults.