HURRICANE MUSIC

When she finds a clarinet in her basement, Aunt Margaret goes wild and decides to ``study the sounds of life'' (``Holy Faloozala! This is a blast'') playing along with animals and trains. But while she is jamming along with a hurricane named Gladys, her instrument is blown away. Everybody helps to look for it, but it is gone. Finally, Aunt Margaret's niece and sidekick, who is also the narrator, takes her to a music store to get a harmonica; it will do, until the next hurricane brings back the clarinet. Bottner (Bootsie Barker Bites, 1992, etc.) makes her playful, syncopated text tongue-in-cheek from start to finish. Yalowitz's pictures, looking as if they were constructed from pale, multicolored sandpaper, depict carefully dressed people with long faces, dots for eyes, and skinny limbs, who seem to be barely held down by gravity. Full of decorative little objects and comic touches (on a couple of occasions, the text begins to break up and fly away), the book's frenetic humor is as likely to appeal to adults as children. (Picture book. 4-8)