Tuba Lessons

Puckish visual humor marks this near-wordless tale of a tuba-toting lad waylaid by adventure as he heads to his music lesson. With the dense hashmarks of Felix's (The Numbers) pastel strokes forming an almost kinetic backdrop, the action moves forward, impelled by the strong unifying feature of five horizontal lines stretched across the bottom of the pages. At first the lines appear to form a road, then they metamorphose into a tree trunk for the boy to climb and play on, and finally become a musical staff as the boy begins to play his instrument. His oompah-ing attracts a cozy assortment of woodland creatures, who caper about in pursuit of the fat notes he produces and become entangled in the lines of the staff. They're eventually mollified by the strains of the boy's music. A frothy little confection infused with a gentle sensibility, this buoyant picture book more than makes up in charm what it lacks in substance. Readers treated to its imaginative pleasures will almost certainly call for an encore. Ages 5-10. (Oct.)