You’ve heard of ‘girl meets boy’? This isn’t that. It’s ‘girl meets horn’.
Cate was a top musician in a leading orchestra—until a disastrous solo humiliated her on the world stage. Traumatised, she abandons her instrument, retrains as a language teacher, reinvents herself online, and travels the world.
Ten years later, after her mother’s death, Cate returns to her bleak Midlands hometown, where she’s drawn into mentoring Sarah, a talented teenage horn player with no professional training. Sarah dreams of making music her career, but her family can’t afford a decent instrument or lessons. She learns by ear, her talent undeniable but her future uncertain.
Cate is the only one who can help.
When a local amateur orchestra announces a concert featuring the piece that once destroyed Cate’s career, Sarah’s big break is at stake. For Cate, helping her succeed could mean redemption—if she can finally face her own past.
This book is a tough read, not because it’s bad, but because it is one that deals with a lot of really sensitive subjects, including loss of a child, mental health, and grief.
Cat is a difficult character to love. I know that she has been through a lot, losing a child, her marriage and her career in one moment, but there’s also the blame that is placed on her, by herself, her conductor and her husband – all for very different reasons. She is so obsessed with her music that she lets it consume her until everything else has been swept away in a tide of notes. However, that’s not the bit which makes her a character whom I struggled to like, at first! She’s selfish! But then grief can do that to a person, make them internalise everything.
After losing her baby and everything which results from that (marriage, career), she takes a little time and then changes her life completely, discarding everything she was before and travelling across the world to become a teacher. Initially, I struggled with this choice, but then I could see it was her distancing herself.
We see little of the time between her leaving her mother’s home and returning 10 years later, but we get snippets. However, then she returns home, her mother has passed away, and she is left to pick up the pieces.
The story focuses on the person Cate has become, the fact that she hasn’t really processed everything that happened 10 years previously and while there are still moments where the selfishness and judgement come through (especially when she is looking down at the people who decided to stay in the town where they grew up), she starts to grow as a person (something it doesn’t feel as though she had done before).
I started to like Cate, especially when she began to build bonds with the people she grew up with, and with Sarah, a young girl who has incredible talent but lacks the dedicated parents Cate had. Seeing the interactions between Cate and Sarah was sometimes heartwarming, sometimes frustrating.
This book is about growth, change and accepting who you are, and that seems to be the struggle that Cate has throughout. She loved her music, but it betrayed her, yet at the end, it’s something of a saviour, giving her something to connect her to others.
I know that grief can change a person, and this book deals with the connection that Cate makes between her mental health and the music she once loved, especially when it comes to processing her own feelings.
Overall, it was a good book, with some incredible heart which came to what I feel was a satisfactory resolution.
