Book summary

A young daughter is “having a hard time falling asleep tonight.” To lull her to “dream,” her mother offers a story about “a baby wrapped in a white sheet and her mother smiling at her.” That baby is the titular jazz legend Nina Simone. Her first childhood memory at “about three” begins with playing the piano: of the 52 white keys and 36 “smaller” black keys, she prodigiously recognizes, “[w]hite was whole. Black was half. It was that way everywhere and for everyone.”

Refusing to accept she “was worth less than other people,” Nina finds solace and sanctuary in music: “The notes had to mingle and dance together in the air so these lies would disappear,” she insists. “Music has no color. In music there is only one rhythm. Only one heart.”

Music gives Nina her voice – as she plays, sings, dreams. At her first concert, 12-year-old Nina demands a front-row seat for her mother after she is moved to accommodate white guests. “Later, much later,” she embraces the dreams of Martin Luther King as her “symphony. Black and white people could come together in the big dance of life.” That “fragile” dream she entrusts to her now-sleeping child.

Nina spent her final decade in France, where she died in 2003. That a French team introduces Nina to younger readers seems fitting. Artist Bruno Liance impeccably complements author Alice Brière-Haquet’s purposeful black-and-white-keys metaphor; his beyond-the-text illustrations (bus passengers divided by race, a civil rights march) prove especially enhancing. As a first stop to learning more about the legendary Nina, this French import is sure to inspire new audiences.

Discover: In this French import, iconic jazz singer and activist Nina Simone encourages her young daughter to dream by sharing a goodnight story about her legendary life.

Review: “Children’s & Young Adult,” Shelf Awareness, November 10, 2017

Readers: Children

Published: 2017 (United States)
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Nina Simone was a natural when it came to music. She started playing the piano at age three and the first song she learned was “God Be With You, Till We Meet Again”.

Though Nina performed at her local church, at age 12 she had her first classical recital concert, where she and her parents experienced a racist situation. Simone later told how during this performance, her parents had taken seats in the front row but they had been forced to give their seats up for white people and move to the back of the hall. She said that she had refused to proceed with the recital until her parents were given their seats back at the front. And they did.

Her spirit to change things and fight for racial justice continued into her adult life as well, once she became an established musician, after years of struggle to fund her musical education and cover the costs of living.
The first time she addressed the racial inequality that was overwhelming in the United States, was at a live concert in 1964, with the song “Mississippi Goddam”.

It was her personal response to the murder of Medgar Evers, June 12, 1963, followed by the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, September 15, 1963, which took away the lives of four African-American girls and partially blinded a fifth who had survived.

Nina had remarked that the title, and the song itself, was “like throwing 10 bullets back at them”.
Later on, she had commented that the song came to her “in a rush of fury, hatred, and determination."