By Mo Willems
A chain of one small 'because' after another that carries a shy girl all the way from a seat in the audience to writing her own music.
Because Beethoven wrote beautiful music, a composer named Franz was inspired to write his own. Because people wanted to hear it, an orchestra formed. Because a musician got sick, someone had to fill in, and because an uncle caught a cold, he gave his ticket to his niece, and so a small brown-skinned girl ends up at a concert that changes her whole life. Every page starts with the word 'because,' each link handing off to the next, until the girl who once just listened grows up to compose music of her own, and a child outside the hall hears it and feels the same spark. This is Mo Willems away from the Pigeon and the Elephant, quieter and dreamier, with soft, glowing paintings by Amber Ren.
If your child loves music and daydreams about making their own, this gently shows that the composer on the stage was once just a child in a seat who got lucky and then worked hard. It's about all the invisible people and small chances behind one performance, the ticket, the understudy, the parents driving to lessons, so a child starts to see art as something built by many hands, not handed down by geniuses. And because it ends with another child catching the spark, it softly tells your own child the chain could run through them.