Press the page and the orchestra plays. Five pieces of Beethoven are built into this board book, one to a spread, and the animals playing them are drawn right there on the page: a bear on the kettledrums, a fox with a bassoon, a mouse with a French horn, a badger on the trumpet, all crowded into one long wooden boat.

The boat travels while it plays, which is what carries a small child through the book. It sets out across a frozen river past skaters and sledgers, ties up at an alpine town where the animals crowd the quay to listen, passes under a castle on a hill, and ends beside a waterfall in a green valley in spring.

Between the tunes, speech bubbles tell the composer's life in a line at a time. Beethoven lived more than 200 years ago, but he will never be forgotten because the music he wrote is so wonderful. Vienna was where the most famous musicians in Europe lived. He wrote lots of beautiful music for the piano. That is a real introduction to a composer, delivered at a scale a toddler can take.

There is an on and off switch on the back cover, which is Usborne being practical: the sound can be turned off at bedtime or in the car and the battery is not run down by a book that gets pressed all afternoon.

Board book with sound, 10 pages, 8.56 by 8.25 in, written by Sam Taplin and illustrated by Ag Jatkowska from the Usborne Musical Books series. Usborne Publishing Ltd., October 2025. ISBN-13 9781836052012. Publisher age guidance: 6 months and up.