Music Notes
Books to Share with Tweens
Judy Freeman, Curriculum Connections -- School Library Journal, 3/13/2008
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Over the years, there have been many swell children’s books written about music, including jazz, blues, and opera. Two of my recent favorites are novels about 10-year-old girls who want to play the piano. Both work well as read-alouds or as booktalks for read-alones, and will make super choices for book club discussion groups.
"I was supposed to play the piano." So begins 10-year-old Zoe Elias’s earnest personal narrative in Linda Urban’s A Crooked Kind of Perfect (Harcourt, 2007; Gr 4-6). Zoe longs to be a child prodigy just like Vladimir Horowitz, the best piano player ever, and dreams of playing in Carnegie Hall.
What instrument does her dad get her instead? A "wood grained, vinyl-seated, wheeze-bag organ. The Perfectone D-60." The girl learns to play it, taking advantage of six months of free lessons from teacher Mabelline Person (which she pronounces Per-saaahn). Zoe even agrees to enter a competition, the Perform-O-Rama, and begins practicing a popular hit of the 1970’s from the Perfectone Songbook.
Mom, the comptroller for the state of Michigan and the family breadwinner, isn’t home much. Dad dreads leaving the house and spends his days cooking and cleaning and taking dozens of correspondence courses from Living Room University. Zoe’s best friend, Emma, has just dumped her for a more popular girl in school, and now Wheeler Diggs, a boy known for punching kids in the stomach, is hanging out at Zoe’s house every day and baking cookies with her father.
The short chapters are on-target funny and quirky, making this one of the true charmers of the past year. And there’s a lot to talk about here with your students; for example, Zoe brings socks as a present to Emma's surprise birthday party. What's wrong with socks and why do the popular girls refuse to wear them, even in winter? And why is Zoe's dad afraid to go anyplace unfamiliar? Zoe reveres Horowitz. Whom do your students admire? What talent could make them famous, if they only practiced?
You'll want to get a recording of Neil Diamond singing "Forever in Blue Jeans," since that's the song Zoe is practicing to play at the Perform-O-Rama. And if you and your students start salivating for Dad's Bada-Bing cookies, use the author's recipe.
Compare Zoe’s experiences with those of Franny Hansen, another aspiring pianist, in Lesley M.M. Blume’s The Rising Star of Rusty Nail (Knopf, 2007; Gr 4-7). The Cold War may be heating up between the United States and Russia, but back in the sleepy little town of Rusty Nail, MN, in 1953, it’s Franny against that spoiled brat, Nancy Orilee, the richest girl in town, in a piano competition at school. Franny and her best friend Sandy, well known as the town's peskiest troublemakers, are already grounded for lobbing water balloons at Nancy.
Meanwhile, Charlie Koenig, the resident young lawyer, returns to town with his mysterious new wife, a Russian pianist, and the locals are all abuzz, convinced she must be a Communist spy. In spite of the townsfolk's growing “better dead than Red” hysteria, Franny's dream is to play the piano, even if it means begging the imperious Madame Olga Malenkov to give her lessons.
There are plenty of discussable points, too, plus a cast of eccentric and comical characters. Ask students about their dreams and how they plan to attain them, even if their friends and family may not approve. Give some background on the McCarthy era. See if your class can come up with any modern-day parallels to the close-minded behavior of the citizens of Rusty Nail. Blume’s author's note states that she structured the book on Sergei Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto no. 2, op. 18. Be sure to play that piece for your listeners, and, in honor of Franny's dad, some Duke Ellington, too.
If you’re thinking of pulling together a booktalk on musical books, you’ll also want to hoot and holler about The Long Gone Lonesome History of Country Music (Little, Brown, 2007; Gr 3-7) Painter, writer, musician Bret Bertholf has put together an effervescent scrapbook on the history, styles, and stars of country music, with unforgettable old-timey caricature-like illustrations, peopled with way more than 100 country stars, rendered in colored pencil and Caran d'Ache crayon on Canson pastel paper.
Read first-person profiles of stars Minnie Pearl, Bob Wills, Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, and Bill Monroe. See how the times, from the Depression to WWII to the Vietnam War changed the music. There’s a page on how to yodel. Put on a CD of Jimmie Rogers and have your kids give it a try. Learn about singing cowboys, country pets (including the squeezal), vee-hickles, huge hairdos, vittles, and vocabulary. There's even a big alphabetical list of country nicknames so you can put together your own moniker. (Mine is Skeeter Gatorface.) Even if you think you don't care about country music, this rip-roaring, rib-tickling, never-been-done overview for kids will get you crankin’ your radio dial to hear some of the tunes firsthand.
Judy Freeman (www.JudyReadsBooks.com) is the author of Books Kids Will Sit Still For 3 (Libraries Unlimited, 2006) and Once Upon a Time: Using Storytelling, Creative Drama, and Reader's Theater with Children in Grades PreK-6 (Libraries Unlimited, 2007).
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