By Pam Muñoz Ryan
A single harmonica passes from child to child across decades, tying three separate stories together into one, with music holding them.
It opens like a fairy tale: a boy lost in a forest meets three sisters under a spell, and a harmonica that carries their fate. Then the book splits into three stories set decades apart, a boy in Nazi Germany whose family is torn by the rise of Hitler, a pair of orphaned brothers in Pennsylvania hoping to stay together, and a Mexican American girl in wartime California facing prejudice while her brother is away at war. The same harmonica travels through all three, and music is the thread that saves each child at the moment they most need saving. The three tales finally braid together in a single soaring finale. It's long, nearly six hundred pages, but it reads fast, and it earned a Newbery Honor.
For the older music-obsessed child ready for a real novel, this is the one where music isn't decoration, it's the thing that carries the whole book, and characters are literally saved by playing. The three-stories-that-connect structure is deeply satisfying for a strong reader who likes to see how pieces fit. And it stretches a child past their own time and place into hard history, the Holocaust's beginnings, the Depression, wartime prejudice, while keeping the harmonica, and hope, running underneath.