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The Green Piano: How Little Me Found Music

by Roberta Flack with Tonya Bolden (text) & narrated by Lynnette R. Freeman
Listening Library. Jul. 2023. 24p. $5. ISBN 9780593793237.
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Gr 2-5–“Little Me” is pop legend Roberta Flack, who grew up in North Carolina, without “fancy-fine clothes, high-priced toys, or other richy-rich things.” What she had was music: her self-taught father played harmonica and piano, her mother the church organ. At “three, maybe four,” Flack was already performing at church, but she longed for a piano of her own. After the family’s move to Virginia, her father rescued an “old, ratty, beat-up, weather-worn, faded thing” from a DC junkyard and lovingly resurrected it into nine-year-old Roberta’s miraculous green piano, enabling her talents to flourish. “Grown-up me lived this dream!” The appended author’s note and career time line make illuminating additions.
VERDICT Lauded author Bolden assists Flack in telling her remarkable story; actor Freeman embodies their text, adapting her rich voice to “little me” of various ages, often over snippets of complementary music, from Beethoven to Flack’s own “Killing Me Softly.”
Reviewed by Terry Hong , Oct 01, 2023

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