The Best Hot Air Balloon Books for Kids

The first passengers were a sheep, a duck, and a rooster. That is the detail children never forget once they hear it: in September 1783, two French papermakers filled an enormous painted bag with smoke, tied a barnyard underneath, and watched it float over Versailles while the king looked on. Everything else about ballooning follows from that same cheerful unreasonableness — there is no steering wheel, no engine, and no way to pick a destination. You heat the air, you leave the ground, and you go wherever the wind is going. Nearly two and a half centuries later, the sight of one drifting low over a field still stops a car full of people mid-sentence.

Bookroo’s collection of hot air balloon books covers both halves of that appeal — the true history and the daydream. Our editors picked the real aeronauts (the first flight, the first crossing of the English Channel, the first woman to fly her own balloon, a family who sewed an escape out of scrap fabric) alongside the invented ones: a fox bound for the moon, a boy who launches from the roof in a balloon made of quilts, and a professor who leaves San Francisco alone and is fished out of the wrong ocean. Start with the twelve favorites below, then browse the picture-book and chapter-book shelves by age.