Drum Dream Girl: How One Girl’s Courage 
Changed Music
by Margarita Engle; 
illus. by Rafael López
Primary    Houghton    40 pp.
3/15    978-0-544-10229-3    $16.99

A young girl dreams of becoming a drummer. Though she lives “on an island of music / in a city of drumbeats,” hers is an impossible dream: only boys play drums. An appended note reveals that the story is based on Millo Castro Zaldarriaga, a “Chinese-African-Cuban girl who broke Cuba’s traditional taboo against female drummers” and in the 1930s played with her sisters in an all-female band, Anacaona. Engle’s poetic text takes its cues from Zaldarriaga’s chosen instrument, its rhythm at times steadily assured and at others loose and improvisational. There’s ear-pleasing onomatopoeia (the “boom boom booming” of sticks on a timbale), copious descriptive adjectives, and thoughtful alliteration, with both lots of hard ds and softer, rolling rs appearing throughout: “Her hands seemed to fly / as they rippled / rapped / and pounded / all the rhythms / of her dream drums.” López’s saturated acrylic-on-wood illustrations capture the musicality of the island (most everyone plays an instrument) and the surreal dream-images (even a mermaid is shown playing percussion) that inspire young Millo to pursue her love of drums. Warm blues and purples swirl against hot pinks and bright oranges — every spread is full of motion, with some of the illustrations requiring a ninety-degree turn, as if the book itself has got to dance.

From the May/June 2015 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.