Great Reading: Bookmark It!

Volume 30, Number 5, June 2003

Music is My Life!

Ruth Cox

Horace and Morris join the chorus (but what about Dolores?) James Howe.
Atheneum, 2002. $16.95. 0-689-83939-1. Grades PreK-4.
Tone-deaf Dolores is not a member of the school chorus until Moustro Provolone realizes she has a gift for writing music. After voice lessons, Dolores joins the chorus, singing recognizable notes, most of the time.

Imani’s music. Sheron Williams.
Atheneum, 2002. $17.00. 0-689-82254-5. Grades 2-6.
Imani the grasshopper convinces the Ancestors to pour the gift of music upon the earth. It then flows back out through the people and their instruments. Imani journeys to the new world on a slave ship, bringing the Ancestor’s gift of African music with him.

The orphan singer. Emily Arnold McCully.
Scholastic, 2001. $16.95. 0-439-19274-9. Grades 2-6.
The desperately poor Dolci family cannot afford music lessons for their musically talented daughter so they leave Catarina at 18th century Venice’s famous Pieta, where musicians such as Vivaldi train foundling girls.

What Charlie heard. Mordicai Gerstein.
Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2002. $17.00. 0-374-38292-1. Grades 3-6.
A picture book biography of Charles Ives, the musical innovator whose noisy compositions were often misunderstood. Gerstein beautifully illustrates the cacophony around Charlie as his music teacher father helps him hear the natural music of the world.

Ruth Cox is assistant professor in the School of Education at the University of Houston-Clear Lake in Houston, Texas. She can be reached at Cox@cl.uh.edu.