Dancing Hands, Margarita Engle
Dancing Hands, Margarita Engle
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Dancing Hands
How Teresa Carreño Played the Piano for President Lincoln

Author: Margarita Engle

Narrator: Almarie Guerra

Unabridged: 29 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/19/2019

Synopsis

As a little girl, Teresa Carreño loved to let her hands dance across the beautiful keys of the piano. If she felt sad, music cheered her up, and when she was happy, the piano helped her share that joy. Soon she was writing her own songs and performing in grand cathedrals. Then a revolution in Venezuela forced her family to flee to the United States. Teresa felt lonely in this unfamiliar place, where few of the people she met spoke Spanish. Worst of all, there was fighting in her new home, too—the Civil War. Still, Teresa kept playing, and soon she grew famous as the talented Piano Girl who could play anything from a folk song to a sonata—so famous, in fact, that President Abraham Lincoln wanted her to play at the White House! Yet with the country torn apart by war, could Teresa’s music bring comfort to those who needed it most?

About Margarita Engle

Margarita Engle is the Cuban-American author of many verse books, including the Newbery Honor winner The Surrender Tree, the PEN USA Award winner The Lightning Dreamer, and the verse memoir Enchanted Air, which has won many awards, including the inaugural Walter Dean Myers Award Honor and the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award. Her books have also received multiple Pura Belpre Awards and Honors, Americas Awards, Jane Addams Awards and Honors, and more.

About Almarie Guerra

Almarie Guerra is a bilingual actor and voiceover artist based in Los Angeles. Born in Puerto Rico and raised in the United States, she grew up reading incredible Latin American literature and developed a love for spoken word. Her professional experiences include audiobooks, theatre, commercials, television, and film, and she enjoys sharing her passion with listeners from all over the world. Her most important skill is being able to do a proper cartwheel.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Calista

Teresa grew up in Venezuela playing the piano with her dad, a politician. War broke out there and they had to leave the country and came to NYC. (The picture of them on the boat in the ocean during a storm with an outline of a girl in the water and her hair was the turbulent waves was very cool.) Sh......more

Goodreads review by Natalia

This book is so beautifully written & illustrated—the language leaps off the page as vibrantly as the illustrations, with a wonderful message of how courage, hope & kindness carry us far in difficult times. I love how the author explored the duality of light & darkness in life, the way they coexist......more

Goodreads review by Darla

The memory of meeting past challenges now helped her fingers dance, celebrating the way life had turned out to be a mixture of all sorts of feelings, happy and sad. Do you know the story of Teresa Carreño? She played the piano in a private concert for President Lincoln shortly after he signed the Ema......more

Goodreads review by Bookishrealm

Dancing Hands..Wow...this was such an informative picture book. Honestly, before reading this book I had never heard of Teresa Carreno or that she played the piano for President Lincoln during the Civil War. I was amazed at how young and talented she was and how she had to escape war from her home c......more

Goodreads review by Moonkiszt

Featured in a grandma reads session. I have lived in this country, gone through its education system in various states and studied history, as taught to the general public, many many times. This is a story I never heard. Not once. And I grew up in the Los Angeles School District to start. . . . The st......more

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