Symphony City

A girl loses hold of her father's hand in a subway station and finds herself alone in the middle of a city. In Martin's hands, this potentially scary theme becomes a hymn to beauty. The city is filled with music: pianos sound, drums beat, and a band plays ("there is music around every corner/ it comes from the street/ and fills the sky"). The girl wanders, listening and observing ("it starts as a sprout/ and bursts into a forest"), watching and dancing ("it leaps and spins/ across the rooftops") until she finds her way safely home. Martin, in her children's book debut, delivers images of meditative calm; in each spread, blocks of translucent color fill in the background, leaving the contours of the pictures' subjects%E2%80%94hands playing instruments, bodies, buildings%E2%80%94outlined by the white space that remains. Martin succeeds in capturing a world of sound using only visual cues; lyrical yet militantly unsentimental, the book's cool appearance is reinforced by the face of the girl, whose lean features could be an adult's. Comes in a foldout dust jacket on which Martin's artwork is reproduced. All ages. (July)