Mozart Musings

The Mozart Season

Virginia Euwer Wolff

U.S.A.: Scholastic, 1991

Genre: Realistic Fiction

Read if: You're a tween or young teen with an intense passion or hobby.

Best for: Early middle schoolers who like reading about real life situations.

If you like it try: 

Johnny Kellock Died Today by Hadley Dyer

Rating: 3/5

Twelve year old Allegra Shapiro is looking forward to the summer: no school, no softball, only freedom. But her lazy days are cut short when she finds out she's made the finals in the Bloch Competition, a violin contest for young adults.  Allegra loves the violin, but she isn't sure if she's ready to play Mozart for  a judge.  

Through outdoor concerts and gigs as a page-turner, visits from an eccentric opera singer, a mystery with a dancing man and endless practicing, Allegra learns what following your passion really means.

The Mozart Season is a quiet, introspective little book about music and growing up. It isn't about a major issue or event, and it isn't stylistically sophisticated or experimental like much YA today. That is not to say that the writing isn't stellar, because it is: Euwer Wolff's prose are simple and clean and very readable.

The book is composed of a number of vignettes about every day life in Portland, Oregon, and how small things change Allegra's twelve year old life. Depicting what it is like to devote your life to one dream  in a realistic and sensitive way, this book succeeds in portraying the simple truths in our lives. Last year I had the chance to hear Canadian YA/children's author Hadley Dyer speak. Her latest book, Johnny Kellock Died Today is very similar in tone to this novel. Dyer said that if her book could have another title, it would be called "The Summer Rosalie (the twelve year old main character) Learned to Love her Mother". If this book had an alternative title, it would probably be called "The Summer Allegra learned Why she Loves the Violin (and everything else in her life)". 

The gentle and realistic tone of this book may not appeal to all readers; there is very little action, and there are long detailed descriptions about playing the violin. It will connect most with a young audience (early middle school, the age I was when I first read this book) who are thinking about the world around them and how it really works.