The final story focuses on Ivy Lopez, whose family has been working as migrant farm laborers in California. Sturbridge will keep Frankie with her rather than sending him to a state home. If he wins a spot in a famous harmonica orchestra (yes, there was such a thing, I checked), he will leave, and Mrs. But it soon becomes clear that she doesn’t want them, and the brothers are to be split up and sent away. Sturbridge, they leap from squalor to luxury. When Mike and Frankie are adopted by the wealthy Mrs. It’s the depths of the Great Depression, and Mike, 11 years old and almost six feet tall, lives in the Bishop’s Home for Friendless and Destitute Children with his younger brother, Frankie. Two years later, the harmonica has passed to Mike Flannery in Pennsylvania. But as each day brings some new threat, the chances of Friedrich achieving his dream, or even keeping his family together, grow more and more faint. Playing it, he gains strength and courage. While preparing for his audition at the conservatory, Friedrich happens upon a mysterious harmonica. But Friedrich would never pass unnoticed, because of the birthmark that covers half his face, branding him as an undesirable and earning him the nickname Monster Boy. By itself, such behavior singles him out.

While in the street or in the schoolyard, he cannot stop his hands from flying upward to guide a music only he can hear. Twelve-year-old Friedrich, growing up in Germany during the years of Hitler’s rise to power, dreams of being a conductor. In “Echo,” a harmonica travels across years and over continents and seas to touch the lives of three embattled, music-obsessed children - and, quite possibly, save a life. Or with words like magic, power or beauty.Īfter reading Pam Muñoz Ryan’s enchanting new novel, you’ll never think of a harmonica the same way again.

But it’s not a serious instrument, not something you’d associate with real music. Or being played by a convict in an old jailhouse movie as he lies on his bunk. We can probably all picture one in the hands of some 4-year-old, pressed to the child’s lips as she makes a wheezy, buzzy racket.

Echo pam munoz ryan review