Book review: The Music Inside Us: Yo-Yo Ma and His Gifts to the World

The Music Inside Us: Yo-Yo Ma and His Gifts to the World

James Howe and Jack Wong

48pp ISBN 9781419755217

Abrams Books £13.99 

This is a picture-book biography of Yo-Yo Ma for four- to eight-year-olds. It is also a coming-of-age story that encourages young readers to ask big questions, as Ma did when he was growing up. What is the meaning of music? Who am I? What am I meant to become? We begin in his family’s small Parisian apartment, where he started to play the cello aged four. Sepia illustrations draw out a childhood spent largely in the ‘room of too much work’, where he and his sister Yeou-Cheng studied music and languages with their father.

The colour palette opens up as Ma, aged twelve, moves to New York and grows into an adult devoted to connecting people and cultures through music. In an interesting unillustrated biography to end, we find out how Ma overcame spinal surgery, accidentally left a $2.5m Stradivari in the boot of a taxi, and became a UN Messenger of Peace.

The big questions posed in this story are, of course, important, but they are perhaps too many (my daughter and I counted almost 20). We would rather have seen space used to contextualise bare-bones information included elsewhere. At one point, for example, we are told that Ma ‘would play on television for children, with Elmo and Mister Rogers and Arthur the Aardvark’. Not all readers will be familiar with these characters.

Instructive, illustrated anecdotes would have been easy to include, about how he taught Elmo to play the violin on Sesame Street, for instance. And elsewhere, why not give a brief example of how Ma ‘would play and speak out to help bring harmony to a troubled and divided world’? To me, these additions and more would have made the story flow forward more meaningfully and engagingly.

Nevertheless, this is a worthwhile book. The illustrations are evocative and skilful, and the story shows the rewards, excitement and adventure that can come from asking big questions and working hard to improve on one’s talents.

PAULINE HARDING