“The author of Gabriel­la’s Song (Atheneum, 1997) moves to the Amer­i­can West for anoth­er tale about the pow­er of music. This time, the hero is the opera star Car­lot­ta Carusa, who sings “with a voice so melo­di­ous that audi­ences throbbed, sobbed, and swooned from its sheer beau­ty.” When Car­lot­ta heads west, read­ers learn that her voice has even greater pow­ers. Sur­round­ed by hun­gry wolves, she sings a pas­sage from Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf and instant­ly tames the ani­mals. An aria from Brit­ten’s Noah’s Flood brings a much-need­ed rain­storm dur­ing a drought. The diva even runs off a pack of out­laws by singing Puc­cini’s Girl of the Gold­en West and con­verts Skull­neck Sam, their leader, into a sher­iff with a fine bari­tone. Catrow’s water­col­or car­toons com­ple­ment the humor, near­ly to the point of over­state­ment. Flem­ing’s words are live­ly and expres­sive, with a tongue-in-cheek tone, while the illus­tra­tions con­vey silli­ness and exag­ger­a­tion in every detail. With bulging eyes, the vil­lain­ous Skull­neck is a Peter Lorre look-alike; Car­lot­ta appears to be all mouth as she belts out her arias; and near­ly every back­ground fig­ure, ani­mal and human, has com­i­cal­ly grotesque fea­tures. Over­all, the com­bi­na­tion works, squeez­ing the max­i­mum amount of humor out of a sim­ple con­cept. An author’s note points out in advance that for cre­ative pur­pos­es, Car­lot­ta sings 20th-cen­tu­ry works in a 19th-cen­tu­ry set­ting.” (School Library Jour­nal, Steven Engel­fried, West Linn Pub­lic Library, OR)