Music and Dance Books
Some kids can't hear a beat without moving, and these books hand them real musicians and dancers who felt the same way. Expect actual instruments, actual stages, and the kind of rhythm that gets your kid up off the couch before the last page.
A long-legged girl who dreams of ballet worries her too-big feet and outspoken mouth will hold her back, so she takes bold, attention-grabbing risks when a famous director visits her class.
A kid gets pulled onstage mid-crowd to play with the band he idolizes. Trombone Shorty by Troy Andrews turns a real New Orleans childhood into pure momentum.
For the quiet kid who doesn't say much but hasn't stopped tapping the table since dinner, King of Ragtime: The Story of Scott Joplin by Stephen Costanza says that's exactly how it starts.
Nina: A Story of Nina Simone by Traci N. Todd doesn't soften Nina Simone into a nice story. It lets her be defiant and lets that be the point.
A determined young dancer in the 1930s and 40s trains for ballet despite discriminatory schools, then refuses to paint her skin white for a company's offer — and rises to become the Met Opera's first Black prima ballerina.
A lone trombone starts to play, then a trumpet joins for a duet, a French horn makes it a trio, and instruments keep arriving until a full ten-piece orchestra fills the stage.
Reach for Dancing Hands: How Teresa Carreno Played the Piano for President Lincoln by Margarita Engle on a night your kid is missing someone. It's about a piano that turns loneliness into songs.
Eight little ballerinas practice plié, relevé, and jeté together in perfect step until Miss Lina introduces a ninth dancer, Regina, and their tidy rows suddenly fall into disarray.
A giraffe named Gerald longs to dance but his crooked knees and thin legs keep tripping him up, until an unlikely friend offers just the encouragement he needs.
A rhyming journey traces hip-hop's roots from folktales, spirituals, and poetry through James Brown's showmanship to the four pillars of graffiti, breaking, DJing, and MCing that built a global culture.
A young left-handed girl picks up her brother's guitar, flips it upside down to play it her own way, and by age eleven has written "Freight Train," a song the world would come to know.
Save Dinosaur Dance! by Sandra Boynton for when the wiggles need somewhere to go. This is not a bedtime book, and it doesn't pretend to be.
A famous composer must write a new piano concerto for Vienna's Burgtheatre but has no notes to give it — until his pet starling's song sparks his imagination, and then she escapes out the window.
If your kid already knows every word of a certain princess-and-swan story, Ella Bella Ballerina and Swan Lake by James Mayhew folds ballet class right into that same daydream.
A band of monkeys drums, hums, and dances through a bouncy rhyme, inviting little ones to find their own hands, fingers, and thumbs along the way.
