I LOVE MUSIC

Recorder, piano, violin, guitars, drums, and xylophone are played by a pig, elephant, cat, zebras, bears, and mice respectively, while chips embedded in each page play an appropriate snippet of music.

Toddlers and most of their parents won't easily recognize all the tunes. The violin snippet is attributed to Brahms; the piano tune is an obscure section of Mozart's “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”; music for the xylophone and drums are credited to Gallimard Jeunesse, the original French publisher. The book demands some significant leaps of faith. How exactly an elephant can sit at a piano and press the keys isn't at all clear, for instance. All the action takes place in a circus setting, though the tunes are not normally associated with circus acts, nor will toddlers recognize the venue from the illustrations. The cartoonish animals bear little resemblance to any real animal, and the fiddle-playing cat is identifiable only through the text. None of this is likely to bother toddlers, who will quickly find the sound buttons embedded in each board page and delight in pressing them repeatedly to charm (or annoy) their adult companions—who will barely have time to read the brief text before their children are ready to move on to the next noise.

Consider this an unessential novelty unless sturdy books with nonanimal sounds are sought.