Dancing Hands
How Teresa Carreño Played the Piano for President Lincoln
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Pura Belpré Illustrator Award
A Kirkus Reviews Best Picture Book
In soaring words and stunning illustrations, Margarita Engle and Rafael López tell the story of Teresa Carreño, a child prodigy who played piano for Abraham Lincoln.
As a little girl, Teresa Carreño loved to let her hands dance across the beautiful keys of the piano. If she felt sad, music cheered her up, and when she was happy, the piano helped her share that joy. Soon she was writing her own songs and performing in grand cathedrals. Then a revolution in Venezuela forced her family to flee to the United States. Teresa felt lonely in this unfamiliar place, where few of the people she met spoke Spanish. Worst of all, there was fighting in her new home, too—the Civil War.
Still, Teresa kept playing, and soon she grew famous as the talented Piano Girl who could play anything from a folk song to a sonata. So famous, in fact, that President Abraham Lincoln wanted her to play at the White House! Yet with the country torn apart by war, could Teresa’s music bring comfort to those who needed it most?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the dark days of the Civil War, a girl named Teresa Carre o sat down at a badly tuned piano to play for a special audience: Abraham Lincoln and his family. This book tells the story of how a young refugee from Venezuela comforted the grieving president with her music. Music helps Carre o express her feelings and cope with her family's emigration to the U.S. "Without a new piano, Teresa would have felt even more lonely.... Teresa practiced... her strong hands accepting the challenges of life's many dark and light moods." Her reputation as a prodigy leads to an invitation at the White House. Intimidated, she tries her best "the memory of meeting past challenges now helped her fingers dance." L pez's swirling colors, soaring birds, and scattered notes conjure music's transportive powers amid the countries' war-torn landscapes, complementing Engle's text, and building "hymns... shimmered like hummingbirds." Ages 4 8.
