A Crooked Kind of Perfect.(Book review)

A Crooked Kind of Perfect, by Linda Urban. Harcourt, Inc. (www.harcourt.com; (800) 638-1639), 2007. 224 pp. $16.

A Crooked Kind of Perfect by Linda Urban is a story about a young girl named Zoe. She dreams of playing the piano, but instead is stuck with an organ: a "Perfectone D-60" to be exact. Although her dreams of playing the piano include performances in Carnegie Hall, being labeled a prodigy like Horowitz, and wearing ball gowns and tiaras, the reality of "Perfectone" organ lessons is grim indeed. In fact, the book provides a model of the worst music lessons imaginable. Zoe uses method books called More with Les taught by "Lester Rennet, Award Winning Music Teacher and Trained Motivational Speaker! Specializing in Children and Seniors! No Instrument Required!" She is taught from Perfectone songbooks: Marvelous Movie Memories, Hits of the Fifties, Hits of the Sixties ... and so on. Routinely, characters offer exclamations like: "Chopin's toaster!' "Great mother of Mozart" "Beethoven's lunch lady!" which would be enough to send me running towards baton twirling. If all this is not enough, the goal of these bad music lessons appears to be competing in an event called the Performo-Rama.

This is a book written for pre-teens--9 or 10-year-olds, I'd guess. Narrated by Zoe, a 10-year-old herself, it is full of long ...