Ferris Bueller said it best, “Yep, life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
I don’t know where to begin. The Man with the Violin succeeds on so many levels that it’s hard to pick the best place to start. Let’s talk about this book’s importance. If you’ve spent anytime following education, then you know of the increasing emphasis the Common Core is placing on non-fiction texts. When I ask kids their opinion of NF, many of the responses come in some form of, “boring.” Yet, these are the same kids who tear apart Ripley’s Believe It or Not and Guinness Book of World Records. So why do students who actively read non-fiction say it’s boring? My guess is that it has to do with the texts they’re presented with in class. I still see very basic, forgettable texts presented to an audience ready to question the complexities of the world. This is where The Man with the Violin breaks ground.
This is a story derived from a fascinating social experiment conducted by world renowned violinist Joshua Bell and a reporter from the Washington Post. The backmatter chronicles the day Bell, dressed in street clothes, brought his priceless Stradivarius to L’Enfant Plaza Station to play the most complex pieces of music written in the last 200 years. While all over the world people pay $100 dollars a ticket for a Bell performance, in 43 minutes, while over 1,000 people heard his music, only 7 stopped to listen. In the end, Bell walked away with just over thirty-two dollars.
We teach non-fiction for a multitude of reasons. But, is there any reason more important than encouraging our students to seek out more non-fiction? It’s hard not to be blown away by what happened in L’Enfant Plaza that day. It’s even harder to present this content in a student-centric manner. This is precisely why Man with the Violin succeeds. Kathy Stinson doesn’t tell Bell’s story, which she could have. It’s gripping enough. But, would it resonate with kids?
The art work is stunning; sophisticated, yet sensible enough to appeal to children.
Wisps of color, rather than action, lead the reader from spread to spread but it’s the glorious, grey-scale images that will keep kids hunting for details.
In the first picture the illustrator, Dusan Petricic, gives a masterclass on how to enhance text with image. Dylan and his mother appear on the far side of the double-page spread with streaks trailing each of the character. At the mother’s line-of-sight, the streak is empty, white space. While at Dylan’s level, the streak is colorful, highlighting an assortment of details to accompany the phrase, “Dylan was someone who noticed things. His mom was someone who didn’t.” Two gracefully elegant lines that, only because of the image’s pairing, have the impact of a falling anvil.
The impact of the illustrations is only surpassed by the impact of the book’s back matter. While Dylan’s story is fictional, a two page spread at the back summarizes the events of January 12, 2007 and provides Joshua Bell’s perspective on how the story relates to his experience that day. So the tough part. Is this non-fiction? The entire story itself is fiction. But between the mini-bio of Bell’s life and the account of L’Enfant Plaza, there’s more NF text in the backmatter than fiction text in the actual body.
The violin music, around which this story is based, originated during a simpler era and provides a nice contrast to the frantic pace of the life many of us find ourselves living. At the end of the day Man with a Violin is a Ferris Bueller story. And just like Ferris adults and kids alike will find Dylan to be the perfect champion. He’s a kid who likes what he hears and just wants a bit more, regardless of schedules; could there be a more relatable universal truth?
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