Inside Out: A Musical Adventure

by Elizabeth Swados

Two indifferent music students find themselves in a world made up of musical instruments who need their help to fight against the evil King and Queen of Flats and their plan to eliminate all music

120 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Elizabeth Swados (February 5, 1951 – January 5, 2016) was an American writer, composer, musician and theatre director. While some of her subject matter is humorous, such as her satirical look at Ronald Reagan (Rap Master Ronnie) and Doonesbury — both collaborations with Garry Trudeau — much of her work deals with darker issues such as racism, murder and mental illness.

Born February 5, 1951 in Buffalo, New York, Swados wrote about her life in her 1991 autobiography, The Four of Us, A Family Memoir, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Her father, Robert O. Swados, was a successful attorney who helped Seymour H. Knox III convert the local Buffalo Sabres hockey club into a full National Hockey League team. His autobiography, Counsel in the Crease: A Big League Player in the Hockey Wars was published by Prometheus Books in 2005.

Her mother struggled with depression, while her older brother (and only sibling) Lincoln developed schizophrenia. Her mother committed suicide in 1974, and Lincoln died in 1989. Swados suffered from depression, a condition she discussed in her book, My Depression: A Picture Book.

She studied music at Bennington College in Vermont, receiving her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1973. In 1980, the Hobart and William Smith College awarded her an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters.

Swados died from complications following surgery for esophageal cancer on January 5, 2016. She was 64.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

Inside Out is definitely on the inventive side. I suppose that sometimes you feel you really need to go to great lengths to get kids to want to practice for their music lessons. This book gets seriously strange and silly at times! Most of the time, I had no idea what was going on. The end ties it all together rather nicely, but probably not soon enough to really save it from flopping. My kids enjoyed all the strange characters, however, and didn’t mind the fact that nothing really seemed very congruent as far as plot or storyline, and that the characters were very two-dimensional. There were times I enjoyed some of the characters inside the instruments; that they were appropriately matched to their instrument, such as the loud robot creatures in the percussion. Other times, I was at a complete loss as to why those specific characters were chosen for that instrument, such as the old men on strings inside the timpani or the governor inside the trombone (his speech was, though, absolutely hilarious…Best part of the whole book)! Then there was that lone character that seemed to follow the twins around everywhere and changed shape—always to something that started with the letter ‘p’. Why the letter ‘p’? I never found out. There were rhymes and songs that had no rhyme nor meter to them…nor any real reason for being there. The pictures were rather terrifying. Overall, the whole book felt as if it were translated (badly) from another language. If you can make it through, by the time you get to the end, you may start checking your instruments for little people, and thinking twice about being out of tune.