Children’s book becomes a family collaboration

Susan Giuliani said her granddaughters, from left, Isabella, Lauren and Emily Stea, helped illustrate her new book, “Musky Takes Manhattan.”

Julie Mansmann/Herald

Keegan and Kaydin Oxford, of Port Ewen, also contributed to the book. Giuliani said Keegan drew most of the pictures.

Courtesy Susan Giuliani

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East Meadowite Susan Giuliani, 70, realized a lifelong dream last year by self-publishing “Musky,” a children’s book about a mouse living in New York City. The final page of the book reads, “The end … or is it?”

“For some reason, I decided to put that at the end,” she said. “I visited a school in New Hyde Park to read the book, and they had all of these questions about what was going to happen to Musky. They got me so excited and really motivated me to continue this story.”

Giuliani did just that, but this time the publishing process was a family affair. Her five grandchildren — Emily, Lauren and Isabella Stea, also of East Meadow, and Keegan and Kaydin Oxford, of Port Ewen — illustrated “Musky Takes Manhattan,” which was published by FriesenPress.

Giuliani, a resident of the Seasons at East Meadow, a senior community on Front Street, always loved to write. But after graduating from high school in Brooklyn in the early 1960s, she didn’t pursued that passion. Instead, she spent decades working in a variety of careers, including finance, real estate, sales, politics and religious education.

Giuliani’s first job after high school, when she was known as Susan Boccio, was as a secretary at McGraw-Hill, on Wall Street in Manhattan — a stone’s throw from the World Trade Center, which was being built at the time. Working in Manhattan, and being so near the Twin Towers in their earliest stages, she said, instilled in her a lifelong love for New York City.

“I think he was me,” she said of Musky, the protagonist of her books, who’s from Staten Island. “I always loved the city, and I would’ve loved to live there.”

The manuscript for the original Musky book sat in a file drawer for a decade. A neighbor at the Seasons, Jerry Cohen, who was impressed by her writing, encouraged her to finally publish it.

Students from Oceanside’s School 5 — where Giuliani’s daughter, Kristin, teaches fourth grade — illustrated her first book. Still passionate about the idea that children should illustrate children’s books, she decided to collaborate with the kids she knew best when she began working on “Musky Takes Manhattan.”