No Ordinary Sound: A Classic Featuring Melody (American Girl Book 1)

I have recently gotten my seven year old daughter into American Girl historical books and we were excited for the unique setting and premise of this one. It surpassed expectations in a lot of ways.A lot of children's books about hard topics can end up reducing the story lines to simply a nonstop parade of heartbreaking facts and moments but this book managed an excellent balance. For all of the tragic, frightening, frustrating moments there are just as many moments showing a young girl in the 60's interacting with her friends, bonding with her grandmother, playing in gym, clashing and then making up with schoolmates, worried about normal family squabbles, getting her hair done, excited and nervous about an upcoming fun event. I was really impressed at how well balanced this book was and how much the author managed to include without the story ever feeling rushed. There was a wonderful chapter about a family bbq that my seven year old loves and goes back to reread all the time.The hard topics in this novel were handled extremely well. The author managed to grapple with the more insidious forms of discrimination in the North and it's differences from the South, concerns about fairness in policing and the law, the need for fair housing laws, voting rights, racist violence, etc without ever having the book reach a point where you felt like it was just a litany of heartbreak. The author interwove those issues very well and made those topics feel very real to my daughter and she learned a lot.There is a lot in here about music in the 60's too that my daughter loved. She asked me to show her the groups mentioned on YouTube (Ronettes, Marvelettes, Smokey Robinson) and really enjoyed reading about a specific song in the book and then getting to hear the music discussed.My daughter was absolutely devastated by the Addy books, she loved them and Addy is her favorite character, but they were gut wrenching for her and this book made her angry and sad at some points but it didn't tear her apart in the same way. So if you are one of the parents who is holding off on Addy please give this book a try.The only complaint my daughter had I did not allow to effect my star rating because it would not have been fair to the author but she complained about how she wished she could have seen Melody with braids since she actually only has straightened hair at one point in the book. It seems odd that she has braids basically throughout the entire thing but the only images of her available are of her with straight hair. My daughter wanted to see what Dwayne and Val and Yvonne and Lila looked like, and she got especially frustrated at the aforementioned family bbq chapter because she wanted to see them all dressed up like the Marvelettes. The lame two page melody's world informational section at the back was a big letdown compared to the older books she has for the other characters. I know it's undoubtedly cheaper for the company to make the books this way but its clearly a step down in quality.

After reading the less-than-inspiring Maryellen books, I was worried about this newest series of American Girl novel, which features an African-American family in Detroit in 1963.This is more like it! Melody and her family seem very real; the family dynamics are wonderful (there's a warm atmosphere that I love, especially between Melody and her sisters), and every family member has a role, unlike Maryellen's very superficial father. There are occasional "info dumps" for the modern child about the early 1960s attitude toward people of color, but they aren't too intrusive. This is what I was expecting from the Maryellen story, something that would make a 1950s Florida girl come alive, not a dumb kid painting the front door red.The story: Melody and her family live in Detroit. Her father works on an auto assembly line, her grandfather is a florist whom she helps occasionally (Melody loves to garden), and her grandmother teaches music. Melody has been asked to sing a solo at her church in the fall and must make the important decision of which song to sing over the summer. In the meantime, her older brother is trying to break into the Motown scene, and her cousin from Alabama is moving to Detroit with her family because of racial conditions in Alabama.I loved that the book addressed not only overt bigotry (when her cousins try to buy a house, they are told the house isn't available—although it is available to whites; when her sister tries to get a summer job at a bank, she are told there are no more jobs, although the bank manager tells a white girl positions are still open), but more subtle things: Melody and brother Dwayne go looking for new clothes in a department store and are promptly accused of shoplifting for just looking at things; Melody's cousin Val is surprised that black people can walk into the front door of the library in Detroit.I can't wait until the second volume is out, but now I really resent that Mattel has gone cheap on the books. I would have loved to have illustrated volumes of Melody's story. I would have loved three illustrated "Inside Melody's World" features in three books instead of a measly two pages: info about the faces of bigotry, the events in Birmingham, behind the scenes at Motown, the story of "Lift Every Voice and Sing." The new "Beforever" line is a cheat. Five stars for the book, minus ten stars for the history background kids are being cheated out of.