Inside Out

Inside Out: A Musical Adventure by Elizabeth Swados

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Inside Out is definitely on the inventive side. I suppose that sometimes you feel you really need to go to great lengths to get kids to want to practice for their music lessons. This book gets seriously strange and silly at times! Most of the time, I had no idea what was going on. The end ties it all together rather nicely, but probably not soon enough to really save it from flopping. My kids enjoyed all the strange characters, however, and didn’t mind the fact that nothing really seemed very congruent as far as plot or storyline, and that the characters were very two-dimensional. There were times I enjoyed some of the characters inside the instruments; that they were appropriately matched to their instrument, such as the loud robot creatures in the percussion. Other times, I was at a complete loss as to why those specific characters were chosen for that instrument, such as the old men on strings inside the timpani or the governor inside the trombone (his speech was, though, absolutely hilarious…Best part of the whole book)! Then there was that lone character that seemed to follow the twins around everywhere and changed shape—always to something that started with the letter ‘p’. Why the letter ‘p’? I never found out. There were rhymes and songs that had no rhyme nor meter to them…nor any real reason for being there. The pictures were rather terrifying. Overall, the whole book felt as if it were translated (badly) from another language. If you can make it through, by the time you get to the end, you may start checking your instruments for little people, and thinking twice about being out of tune.



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