Gustav’s Musical World: A journey in note recognition

In this playful book, a pointer pup named Gustav takes readers on a journey through his day as he listens to music, chases squirrels, goes on a walk, and catches up on news from his doggie neighbors. The vibrant illustrations by Nora Lee are beautiful and make the story come alive! I can appreciate the author’s intention of using this as an introduction to music note recognition, however, I think a more effective approach would have been to incorporate the notes on the staff with their letter names into the actual story text instead of having a line of text followed by a completely separate staff line with notes and then the note names listed below it, resulting in a random assortment of letters. It actually took me a minute to figure out that the staff was displaying just the notes that correlated with letters from the text that are found in the music alphabet. Gustav explains this at the beginning of his story, but it still didn’t register until I studied it more intently. The book could have benefited from some additional editing to fix minor typos as well. I’m sure young readers will find themselves instantly attached to the likeable Gustav, and even if they don’t come away from the story with much musical understanding, they will at least be familiar with the image of a music staff and notes.

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