A 2021 Kirkus Reviews' Best Indie Book of the Year 2021 Sarton Book Awards: Gold Medal Winner in Contemporary Women's Fiction The highly anticipated new novel from the multiple award-winning author of Queen of the Owls ... What if you had a second chance at the very thing you thought you'd renounced forever? How steep a price would you be willing to pay? Susannah's career as a pianist has been on hold for nearly sixteen years, ever since her son was born. An adoptee who's never forgiven her birth mother for not putting her first, Susannah vowed to put her own child first, no matter what. And she did. But now, suddenly, she has a chance to vault into that elite tier of 'chosen' musicians. There's just one problem: somewhere along the way, she lost the power and the magic that used to be hers at the keyboard. She needs to get them back. Now. Her quest - what her husband calls her obsession - turns out to have a cost Susannah couldn't have anticipated. Even her hand betrays her, as Susannah learns that she has a progressive hereditary disease that's making her fingers cramp and curl - a curse waiting in her genes, legacy of a birth family that gave her little else. As her now-or-never concert draws near, Susannah is catapulted back to memories she's never been able to purge - and forward, to choices she never thought she would have to make. Told through the unique perspective of a musician, The Sound Between the Notes draws the reader deeper and deeper into the question Susannah can no longer silence: Who am I, and where do I belong?
Solid Story, Could Have Used Better Structure. This was a solid story of a woman trying to find herself after putting her career on pause to raise her kid and give him a life she had never had. For me, though, the structure of the storytelling itself would have dramatically benefited from a slight variation of the technique here. Here, we get a mostly dual timeline story, a bit scattered at times (date stamps alone would have been useful in that regard, even if just "x years ago") but workable. What *really* could have elevated this story though would have been to take a page from another tale of another professional struggling to find his way and looking back on his life - Billy Chapel in the *movie* version of For Love Of The Game. (We shall not speak of the book - one of very few cases where the movie is by far the superior story.) There, the story is told in the same dual timeline approach that we get here - but with *both* timelines happening before the seminal event (in that case, the last game Billy Chapel will ever pitch as a professional baseball player, in this case an important concert), then some follow-up after the event itself. Ultimately just a tweak, though a significant one, that would have made the story flow so much better for at least this reader. Still, truly a worthy read and very much recommended.
Reading updates
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24 February, 2021:
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24 February, 2021:
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