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Hallelujah Handel

by Douglas Cowling, Jason Walker, illus.

The power of music to console and preserve is the underlying story of this new picture book based on the recording by Classical Kids of the same title.

Darker in its subject matter than other stories in the series (such as Beethoven Lives Upstairs and Tchaikovsky Discovers America), Hallelujah Handel features three young boys who live on the perilous streets of 18th-century London. Their activities and meagre earnings are kept under the control of a sinister man they call the Keeper. One of the boys, Tom, cannot speak – because of some undisclosed earlier trauma – but he can sing like an angel. On the streets the boys encounter composer Georg Frideric Handel, who becomes particularly interested in Tom when he hears the boy sing one of his own opera arias. Handel eventually helps Tom to gain security and healing in an orphanage he has helped found.

The compassionate character of Handel (who really did help care for street children) illuminates the dark world inhabited by Tom and his friends. Their London is also shown, in the charming pictures as well as the text, to contain life and colour – the King’s pleasure boat on the Thames, a performance at the Opera House – with atmospheric borrowings from both Oliver Twist and Phantom of the Opera.

Some plot details in Hallelujah Handel are confusing, but the excitement of the search for Tom builds effectively. At the heart of the story, however, is the music. While the text can give us the words of the arias Tom sings, and describe the sound effects in the “Music for the Royal Fireworks,” the experience of the story is so much richer when the music is heard along with it on the accompanying CD.

 

Reviewer: Gwyneth Evans

Publisher: Scholastic Canada

DETAILS

Price: $18.95

Page Count: 44 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-7791-1391-8

Released: Oct.

Issue Date: 2002-12

Categories: Picture Books

Age Range: ages 8-11