PIANO PIANO

Thanks to some grandfatherly intervention, young Marcolino avoids the hated piano to practice a more agreeable instrument in this pointed import. Plinking and plunking away out of guilt over his mother’s claim that she practiced for hours when she was a child, Marcolino imagines using the piano for karate practice, or turning it into a formula-one racer or a modernist work of art. Relief comes at last when he complains to Grandpa, who reminds his mother (with a box of old snapshots) that she actually hated the piano, and then takes him to a music store to make his own choice. Marcolino, seen in the final two spreads happily tooting “Poo Poo Poo” on a massive tuba, sports hair lacquered into the shape of a comet’s tail, which gives Heliot’s crowded cartoon-and-collage illustrations a stylish, windblown look. Though framed as a tale for emergent readers, this actually has more to say to parents with selective memory who might be disinclined to give their children’s preferences sufficient weight. (Picture book. 6-8)