Echo by Pam Munoz Ryan

What is the true power of music? What makes music connect us, inspire us, and strengthen us? How does music touch us? This spellbinding, melodious tale from Pam Munoz is a dreamy answer to such musings. The book opens with a surreal fairytale about a boy who gets lost in the woods and meets three magical sisters. Listening to the boy's plight, the sisters imbue a harmonica with their magic to guide him home. This tale forms the archway over Friedrich, Mike, and Ivy – three children in three separate times and places, all struggling to overcome lives filled with adversity. Friedrich is growing up in Germany just before WWII in the shadow of Hitler's rise to power. With a family threatening to be ripped apart by political injustices and sporting a large facial birthmark, Friedrich copes with being treated as defective while desperately attempting to hold his family together. Mike is an orphan who struggles to care for his younger brother in Pennsylvania as the Great Depression looms large. The brothers are poor, unloved, and unwanted, and set to be torn apart from one another despite Mike's best efforts. Finally, Ivy is a child of Mexican-American migrant farm workers in California who are tasked with running a farm that has been bereft of its Japanese-American owners, the Yamamotos, who were sent to an internment camp in the wake of Pearl Harbor. Ivy's family struggles with racism, attempts to “Americanize" the children in schools, and danger by association with the Yamamotos. These three children have one thing in common that threads their lives together – their passions and talents for music, and an encounter with a golden harmonica. As each child brings the harmonica to their lips to play, they find that the music they create gives them resilience to face their challenges – and binds them all to one another. This is a wonderful story for anyone who likes history or music, and is full of honorable, strong young characters that will inspire. 592 pgs, hc.