For some time I've been tracking down middle grade stories that feature music, and particularly string instruments, and this one was just fantastic!
Usually middle grade stories start with a main character who clearly has a story goal in mind. While 12-year-old Rose Brutigan does want to win a cello suite contest so she can continue taking cello lessons with the Maestro Waldenstein, it's not just because her mom can't afford to keep paying for lessons. It's because her teacher is moving away!
It isn't really her "story want." It's been thrust upon her, although she does love Bach and the Cello Suites and preparing for the competition. Although when she meets Maestro Waldenstein, she's not at all sure she likes him -- or wants cello lessons from him!
It's when her twin, Thomas, gets her involved in something more than cello practicing that everything goes wrong. He needs help building a composting bin to make compost for the giant pumpkin they're growing in Mr. Pickering's yard (their next-door neighbor). Rose offers to cut the boards using a table saw. You can see where this is headed…and ouch, it's not good. I won't say exactly what happens to her, because it forms the rest of the story.
I loved Rose's diverse neighborhood with all the caring neighbors, including Mr. Pickering (who starts the pumpkin growing mania that seizes their town), Senor Ocampo, Mrs. Kiyo, Kirk the mailman (and former cellist), Jane and her tap teacher, Miss Sarah, and even Rose's doctor.
It was an uplifting story of making the most of what you've got when everything you've planned for goes to heck in a handbasket. And as a momma of a high-level violin player who sprained his left wrist and it's taking for-ev-er to heal, we can totally relate to the message this book sends.
Enjoy!
The premise of this book rests heavily with an extinct species, the thylacine, a Tasmanian marsupial "tiger" of the Australian island's rainforest. It was declared extinct by the IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) in 1982, although there are periodic sightings that can't be verified and fuel the imagination for this tale -- what if a thylacine heard a violin? How would it respond?
Louisa's mom ships her off to Tasmania to experience the family's run-down, dilapidated nature camp one last summer before the local state takes it over and builds an overpass through its heart. Turns out, they never really owned the land to begin with.
She hears Vivaldi's "Spring" in the birds, as if in a concert, upon her arrival. She's brought her violin because she has a big audition when she gets back home, and she practices on the night she arrives and hears…something in the rainforest.
But after the encounter with the enormous spider in her room, and her Uncle's warning not to go off into the rainforest at night or by herself, she stays put and never sees what makes the mystery sound.
She quickly susses out that her Uncle is hiding a secret, a very big secret: the world's last known pack of thylacines roams the forest, and he doesn't want anyone to find out.
But he thinks a female has stayed behind and not moved on with her pack, possibly drawn by, of all things, the sound of Louisa's vioin. They need to make sure the female joins the others -- or the species may go extinct.
Louisa figures out where the female's hiding. Now the question is, can they lure her out, trap her, and reunite her with the pack before road construction starts?
It's a great read, and a wonderful what-if premise.
Enjoy!
This is a WWII tale in verse, and I do mean, verse. The text, while mostly in free verse, is set apart from other “verse” novels in that it also has wonderfully teachable poetry representing most of the forms in your ELA teaching standards, including: tercet, list, couplet, cinquain, ABC/acrostic, reverso, elegy, triolet, haiku, shape, lyric, nonet, found, quatrain and ode.
It’s also a Ukranian story, featuring the Nazi invasion of Ukraine, and what the Nazis did to the Ukranian Jews.
It starts with Zhanna and her family living in Stalinist controlled Ukraine. Her father is arrested, and the family goes from relative prosperity to abject poverty. They move to another city, where the girls are offered scholarships and a living stipend at a prominent conservatory (music school).
Stalin allies with Hitler in 1939 in the Nazi-Soviet Pact, which promises a decade of non-aggression between the two countries. It appears as if things are looking up for the family until Hitler, who not-so-secretly despised the Russian and Slavic peoples, broke the treaty and invaded not even two years later in 1941.
When the family is being forced from their home by the Nazis, Zhanna rushes back to the house to get her music, Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu. They are marched to an empty tractor factory, where they rest for a few weeks without being fed. She slips past the guards to walk home to get food for her family, and a farming family hides her on her way there and back.
Then they are told to march again, and as the family is being marched to Dobritsky Yar, a mass grave of Jews, her father parts with a gold watch to entice a soldier to look the other way while Zhanna runs away.
“Just live,” he tells her.
She escapes, but hiding from the Nazis is near-impossible. She doesn’t ask the farm family for more than a night’s rest. Her former best friend slams the door in her face. An unlikely ally opens the door…and saves her.
She tries to hide, but she and her younger sister, Frina, were well known piano soloists in their hometown, so while Zhanna takes a German alias – Anna – and pretends to be German, she’s in constant danger of being recognized and exposed.
Amazingly, she’s reunited with her sister, Frina, and the two girls navigate the long, hard road to escape Hitler and the Nazis.
I won’t spoil how it ends, but it is a true story. I loved the authors’ notes, the photos, the extra resources and more in the back of the book (about 25 pages worth).
