Books like Mi Ciudad Sings — picked by fans

Two cheerful deer take us on a tour of their city of Mazatlán, Mexico. I love the tone of this book—wide-eyed enthusiasm for this fascinating city.

The book is bilingual in English and Spanish and is full of humor and the incredible sights and sounds of Mexico. It makes you want to hop on a plane and explore. The story is in verse and is great for reading in my class, particularly kindergarten. The art adds a lot, and the Spanish translation is very well done.

Grandma comes home from her visit to Mexico with a suitcase full of surprises. Inside was a wonderful little drum and a clay bird whistle. After playing music, Sabrina learns more about Mexico, from Mayan Princesses to cities of gold and chocolate, of course. Cacao seeds were used as money in the times of the Mayans! They also like to have melted chocolate poured over bowls of snow, just like a chocolate snow cone. After an afternoon of making traditional Mexican hot chocolate, Sabrina starts to understand that chocolate is an important part of her ancestor’s history.

I loved all the history and the illustrations in this bilingual book, and of course, I love chocolate!

The Rynnie Roo books are always such fun, and this one is no different. This book takes the reader on an adventure as they explore the animals that live in the Yucatan jungles of Mexico. It includes some words from the Mayan language and even talks about the many, many dinosaur bones that have been found in the region as well as the types of dinosaurs that were common there.

I love the characters Jean Johnson has created for this series and the fact that she actually grew up in the Yucatan jungle. It’s always great fun to read this one to my students here in Mazatlán, Mexico. They love learning about the other side of their country.

Two cousins, Charlie and Carlito, write to each other about their lives. Charlie is in the United States and talks about riding the subway to school in the big city and playing basketball with friends. Carlito is in the country in Mexico and walks to school each day past the “burro” (donkey) and the “nopales” (cactus), and plays football with his friends. Some things seem different but in many ways their lives are alike.

The art is a simple style but really charming and colorful and has won an honor award for the illustrations. There are Spanish words peppered through the book and what I really like is that it shows the strong connection between the two countries. In many ways, the United States and Mexico are also cousins.

This book showcases the extraordinary writing of the novelist and journalist Elena Poniatowska. She weaves together the voices of multiple journalists, her own reflections, and above all the testimonies of dozens of survivors of the two earthquakes that battered Mexico City and surrounding areas on September 19 and 20, 1985. It is both a moving report of people's suffering as well as a stirring portrait of how common people stepped in and created search and rescue teams and offered relief when government efforts failed. Poniatowska masterfully captures what many historians consider a key before and after moment in modern Mexican history.

This is a collection of wonderful short stories, not a novel. It was my introduction to de Lint’s Newford, the setting of many of de Lint’s later novels and collections, a fictional composite of the best aspects of several North American cities, where beings from different mythologies co-exist with humans and interact with those who believe in them. It's such a fascinating setting, and feels so real, that I wish I could live there.

Samuel R. Delaney’s masterpiece, Dhalgren, is set in a city in the Midwest that has been emptied by an unnamed catastrophe.

A sense of freedom, violence and disaster hang everywhere as the hero – Kidd, Kid, or the kid, a man with no memory and of ambiguous race (he remembers his mother was Native American) – gains entry into the subcultures that remain behind: parties, high-rise poetry readings with older white people, gun fights, gangs, graphic sex.

Time and perspective seem fluxive, inconstant, and looping. 

This is beautiful, destabilized world building. Dhalgren answers no questions yet evokes a time, place, and milieu that shifts as you read.

I first found it when I was working as a librarian in a prison out on the plains. I didn’t last in prison.

This is a masterful work covering the period from the Norman conquest to the Black Death. Sarah Rees Jones is one of my go-to scholars for medieval York, as well as an engaging writer. I particularly appreciate her looking beyond the importance of the royal government in the city’s development to include the strong influence of the Minster and other ecclesiastical institutions in the city as well as the significance of the people of York—merchants and craftspeople.

Check here first if you want a feel for how the city grew, who were the makers and shakers, how the neighborhoods developed, where the influential people lived. Every time I dip into this book I learn something new. With 18 useful maps and an extensive bibliography.

Charles de Lint is one of my favorite authors, and this book of short stories is set in Newford, his fictional city. It’s a fully-formed universe where there's always more to discover. You can read any of his books at any time; there’s no order they must be read in. I guarantee that the more you learn of his worlds—and especially Newford—the more you’ll want. I read Pixel Pixies (my favorite short story of all time) to my mom and dad when my mom was dying of cancer. I could barely read the last paragraph for wanting to cry; not because the story is sad, but because it's so beautiful, so hopeful, so abso-freaking-lutely wonderful. I still get teary-eyed thinking about that evening of reading that story to my mom and dad.

That’s what de Lint does. He transports you not only to a world, but indelibly marks the feelings… show more.

This is based on the L.A. River (which is undergoing an exciting revitalization) but it could be any industrial downtown: freeways, warehouses, graffiti, smog. A boy discovers a secret place, where a river still runs through a concrete bed. In hushed tones, he tells us who else knows his secret - an egret, a green-winged teal, nesting mallards, coyotes, and possum. The vivid description makes me feel as if I am right there with him, sharing his sense of wonder. This deceptively simple book offers a powerful argument for restoring green space.