The Horn Book Guide

BIOGRAPHIES

Gerstein, Mordicai

What Charlie Heard

40 pp. | Farrar/Foster | March, 2002 | Trade ISBN 0-374-38292-1 $$16.00

(1) K-3 Composer Charles Ives was "born with his ears wide open" to melodies played by his music-teacher dad and to all other sounds in late-nineteenth-century Connecticut. The deftly sketched scenes are overlaid with the sounds that were Ives's inspiration--onomatopoetic words, like cheerful graffiti, are rhythmically repeated in vivid color. This is a thought-provoking picture book, an unusually creative synthesis of format, composition, and text.

Reviewer: Joanna Rudge Long | Horn Book Magazine Issue: May, 2002