Music Book Review – Ada’s Violin: The Story of the Recycled Orchestra of Paraguay by Susan Hood

I have had this book on my To Be Read pile for a while now, and I am very glad I have now read it for this month’s Music Book Review. It is a book that is inspiring both in terms of the resilience of the people involved, but also their creativity in making something beautiful out of, literally, rubbish. It also gives you opportunities to talk about a lot of different issues, not just discussions about the music involved in the book.

To start with, the blurb on the back of the book, well on the sleeve on my copy of this book:

A town built on a landfill.

A community in need of hope.

A girl with a dream.

A man with a vision.

An ingenious idea.

THE RECYCLED ORCHESTRA, comprising children from Cateura, Paraguay, playing instruments made from recycled trash, performs concerts all over the world to sold-out audiences. Here’s how’s it began.

Ada’s Violin is a non-fiction book telling the story of how The Recycled Orchestra came into being. The book was written by Susan Hood and illustrated by Sally Wern Comport, the illustrations perfectly matching the subject matter of the book, with little scraps of paper, music manuscript and hinted at images of trash that would be found in the landfill sites, it is wound into the fabric of the story. Susan Hood’s book takes us to an area of Paraguay called Cateura that was built around an enormous landfill site. The town actually built up around the landfill site, so much so that the trash from this landfill is absolutely everywhere. In the town’s water, in the streets, in residents gardens, everywhere.

She introduces us to Ada’s family, who love music and who are able to start music lessons when a man named Fabio Chávez comes into town. Chávez was an Environmental Engineer, brought in to help make practices on the landfill as safe as possible, as many people in the town worked on the landfill site, combing through the trash dumped there to find things that could be sold on to be recycled. Chávez saw the conditions people lived in there, and that there was little for young people to do in the town, and the direction their lives turned in, given the absence of anything else to fill their time with. Himself a musician, Chávez started to offer music lessons to young people of Cateura. Chávez recognised that musical instruments were absolutely impossible for any of the children to purchase and that, given that a violin cost more than a house, if a child was given a musical instrument, it would very quickly get stolen. So he worked with one of the recyclers who was also a carpenter, Nicolás “Cola” Gómez, to make musical instruments out of things they found in the landfill site. Over time, the music lessons lead to an orchestra being formed, and this book tells you about the forming of the orchestra, and what came out of the students’ experiences once the orchestra came into being. You will have to read it for yourself to find out more.

This is a really inspiring story. It is inspiring in terms of the creativity involved on the part of the children taking music lessons, Chávez and Gómez in getting the musical instruments made and coming up with the idea. Inspiring in terms of the difference that music has made to the children’s lives, the hope they now have of having something other than the landfill site in their lives. The whole story is quite amazing, and well worth a read. It’s a book that can prompt many discussions with your children, both about the music involved and making of the innovative musical instruments, but also about many social justice issues for example:

• the people in Cateura live on less than $2 per day, or they did when this book was written (it was published in 2016), compare this to the average income of Western nations.
• environmental issues and the use of landfill – discussions can be around our consumerist society and throwing things away too easily, filling up landfill rather than recycling things ourselves.
• much of the waste from Western countries can be sent off to be stored in landfill sites in other countries, what are the issues that arise from this? Is it fair that our rubbish is sent off to other, poorer countries to be dealt with?

As I mentioned at the top of this review, I have had this book on my To Be Read pile for a while. My son read the book a while ago, though, when he was 8 years old and he enjoyed the book. The book made quite an impression on him, and he talked about this book for a good few weeks afterwards. He told me that he thought it was a book for everyone to read. He is growing up, as are all of our children these days, in a world where we talk a lot about needing to recycle more and be conscious of what we throw away. He also lives in a household where we like to make DIY instruments, and so it is not surprising that he found this book very interesting. He loved the idea that you could make something beautiful from what most people would see as rubbish, and unusable.

Despite my son saying that he thought the book was for everyone, I would temper his enthusiasm a little, and say that I think his reading it at 8 was probably about the right age for this book, particularly to appreciate some of the more societal issues that the book prompts you to think about. I would recommend the book for those aged 8 and over, probably ages 8 – 10 or 11 as I feel the language and story may be a little simplistic for older readers. Amazon puts the age recommendation as 4-8, and while readers younger than 8 can certainly enjoy the story of the musical instruments made from trash, I am not sure that they would full appreciate some of the other issue the book raises. As always, you know your children far better than I do and what their interests are, and their reading abilities, but I would stick with recommending the book for ages 8-10 or 11. The book is available from retailers including Amazon and at the time of writing this review it is priced at £11.95 for a hardcover copy, £8.49 for a kindle version of the book. A Spanish language version of the book is also available to purchase on Amazon.

If you want to find out more about The Recycled Orchestra of Paraguay, there are a number of videos on YouTube about them including excerpts from a documentary made about them, which includes interviews with the real Ada from this book and her family, which was made almost 10 years ago called Landfillharmonic. Here is one short excerpt for you to watch – and this excerpt is absolutely fine for you to share with the whole family:

If you have enjoyed reading my blog post, thank you. I am always looking for ideas for the blog, so would love to hear from you with suggestions for topics you would like me to cover in the future. Also, if you would be interested in supporting me to keep this blog running, buying the books to review here, and supplies to make the DIY instruments, for example, I would be absolutely delighted if you would consider buying me a coffee using the following link: Buy Me A Coffee Thank you!!