Bruce Brooks

I finally grabbed this from my bookcase on a whim the other night and started in. For some reason, I had thought this was a fantasy. I don't know why, exactly, other than I read that almost exclusively for the longest time. It also means that I have the delight of discovering new-to-me young adult books that people normally read back in middle or high school that I skipped over.

Like this one.

If you were to ask what is the theme of this book, I'd have a hard time describing it. There's music, of course, as the main character is a cellist. It's not quite a coming of age story, though it's close. It's a story of family, and self, and music.

Silibance T. Spooner unexpectedly asks her father to take her to meet her mother, who she has never met. This starts a cross-country journey where she learns about her parents and the Age of Aquarius. There's some very well-done introspection on how people change over time and being true to one's self, as well as finding oneself through music.

There's also a secondary story about a mystery Soviet cellist that Sib spends an inordinate amount of time trying to track down, that ties in neatly and wonderfully with the main story.

There's really a lot going on in this book. I enjoyed it a lot. I only wish I had actually read it 15 years ago. I also wish it wasn't so long out of print.… (more)

The book follows Asa through his childhood, through multiple moves as his mother leaves his father and remarries to a man who neither understands nor seems to like Asa much at all, through his mother's battles with depression, and through his own struggles with being much more intelligent than his peers, not fitting in, and trying to be as compassionate as he can with everyone around him. It's a lovely story and for the most part it's well told, but for me it doesn't quite work as well as it could, because Asa himself isn't very believable a character. He's very smart for his age, which is fine, but he's also incredibly (in the literal sense of that word) emotionally mature and self-aware. He has a grasp on the motives and emotions of others that no child could possibly have. It's so far from believable that it kept jarring me out of the story, and his insights are so keen that I also don't think this book is Newbery material (it won the Newbery Honor in 1993). If the Printz award had been around then, I could see it in that category, which tends toward more mature content for YA, but it just seems too sophisticated for the Newbery.… (more)