Reviews for The Library of Piano Classics (Music) (Vol 2)

The average rating for The Library of Piano Classics (Music) (Vol 2) based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-01-01 00:00:00 Gregory A. Reinhardt Poor Karen Hesse. She might have managed to get this manuscript past an editor at a major publishing house, but she had no idea the scrutiny she was receiving here, at our house this week. My 9 and 11-year-old daughters are scarier than any editor that ever held office space in Manhattan, and they agreed to a mutual read-aloud of this one, as long as I sat in between them so they wouldn't kick or punch each other while I read. We're home, like you are, trying to distract our minds with our recently invented “Kids Read Across America” project, and we selected this middle grades read as our entry for Florida, as the back cover reads: Mila creates headlines around the world when she is rescued from an unpopulated island off the coast of Florida. . . Problem #1: none of the story takes place in Florida. So, where does the story take place? Well, in a facility in Boston, but there's no sense of setting, other than the ocean or the facility with the medical staff. So, it won't count for Massachusetts, either. Problem #2: the protagonist, Mila, is a feral girl who has lived the last decade of her life with a pod of dolphins and Ms. Hesse was challenged here, to come up with dialogue that would capture the speech of a girl who hasn't spoken with humans since she was four. It worked. . . some of the time. My girls loved the dolphin aspect; at one point my 11-year-old expressed how badly she wished she could live among dolphins, rather than humans (hard swallow and silence from mom), both girls loved that Mila emerged from her life in the water covered with barnacles and seaweed-length hair, and they both loved the beginning. . . But, when we got to the complicated, weird ending, my middle child looked at me and said, “Knock off another star for the ending. You've got to end strong.” (Problem #3) Tough crowd. I don't know what has made my children such savage editors. . . Wink.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-03-17 00:00:00 Billy Burleson Simply put, this is one of the greatest books I have ever read. Karen Hesse's ingenious interpretations of life lived like an animal gave me constant, visible chills all over my body. The writing is perfect, and I won't spoil the story by saying too much in this review; I'll just say this is an awe-inspiring masterpiece of literature, and in a year of incredible Newbery contenders (including Jerry Spinelli's Crash and E.L. Konigsburg's The View From Saturday), I would have awarded the 1997 Newbery Medal to The Music of Dolphins.