Ada’s Violin: The Story of the Recycled Orchestra of Paraguay by Susan Hood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I am reading a list of picture books this summer, looking for ones to include in my junior high classroom library.
What I am looking for in the text, with teen readers in mind, is some dialogue, sentence variety, topic-specific vocabulary, and an idea or issue that will prompt teen readers to do deeper inquiry into that idea. I’d like the idea to promote diversity, as in including diverse voices and perspectives with a historical, environmental, social, and even global context.
The artwork is also important. I am looking for diverse faces and settings with images that teen readers can “read.”
This book is definitely going into my middle school classroom library. So many of my students are musicians, the first in their family. And so many of my students are unaware of the world beyond the US and Mexico, unaware of waste management, unaware of child labor. This book invites students into a world beyond their own in so many ways — first, with the story and second, with the images. I had to take more time to read the artwork than the text — such detail. I appreciate that the story did not have a “neat” solution with Ada and her family leaving Paraguay but rather the music program reinvesting in the community. (I’d recommend the novel Trash to students after they read this.)