Monday Book Recs--Sara Zarr's The Lucy Variations and Caitlen Rubino-Bradway's Ordinary Magic

Sara Zarr's The Lucy Variations



I have a musically talented daughter, so this book about Lucy Beck-Moreau, who abruptly ended her career eight months ago by walking off the stage of The Prague piano competition and hasn't played since, was especially interesting to me. The reasons for the end of Lucy's career rang true to me. I am not much of a pushy parent. I remember having a conversation with a mother of another musical prodigy in our area who was a friend of my daughter. I told this mother that I had threatened my daughter with cancelling her music lessons if she didn't clean her room. This was pretty effective, since I didn't care that much about my daughter's very expensive music lessons and she did. But the other mother was APPALLED. Couldn't I think of something else to use as leverage, like cutting off her computer usage? Well, my daughter simply didn't care about her computer usage. She cared about her music lessons and that was it. And her room had become a disaster. I truly don't expect a spotless room. Just a space that you can walk into without worrying about touching dead mice or rancid food.

Anyway, this was one of the many experiences with parents of the ultra-competitive music world I have had. I remember another mother telling me quite insistently that if I wanted my daughter to get into a good school like Harvard, music was the best way because it really looked "good" on applications. I was tempted to tell her that I had gotten into Princeton just fine without any music on my application, and that in my opinion, the best schools cared about the whole student and not about the parents pushing the student. I refrained. Barely. But there were also plenty of situations in which I ended up looking like the bad parent. Whenever I tried to tell teachers that I really did not know anything about music, I think they thought I was being falsely modest. They would introduce my daughter to a new piece and insist that she must have heard it before. Nope. She hadn't. I rarely listen to music of any kind at home because it interrupts my thinking while writing. Another instance was when my daughter spent hours talking to another parents at a music competition and came home saying, "Mom, I never talked to a mother who knew so all the pieces I want to play." So clearly, I am a defective mother of a musical prodigy. She also ended up spending at least a year known by the last name of another family because they drove her back and forth with their son to a regular musical event quite a distance away since I was unwilling to.

This is all to say that there was a part of me that was horrified and a little self-congratulatory at the look inside the world of an international music prodigy. Her grandfather and mother push-push-push her every step of the way, and she reaches the point where she doesn't care about music anymore. She wants a real life, a regular teenage life. But she also realizes she wants to get music back on her own terms. And she has to deal with the competition with her younger brother, who has now become the focus for the family's mania for musical success. I absolutely believed this family. I have met so many like them. I also didn't hate them, which I think is to Zarr's credit. She made me see them as three-dimensional people who were trying on some level to do what was best for the children involved. I cringed at things everyone did in the book, but I never for a moment disbelieved them. This is one of Zarr's great gifts as a writer. She makes me believe absolutely that these people are real. I feel I know them intimately and carry them around in my head for years afterward. Every one of Zarr's books is like this. I can say of few authors that I have loved everything they have written, but Zarr is one of them.

And in addition to that, Zarr's books always end up making me ask myself the uncomfortable questions I don't necessarily want to ask myself. Instead of feeling that The Lucy Variations "exposes" the dark underside of the competitive child-musical prodigy world, it made me ask myself if the real reason I don't push my daughter is because of my own laziness. It made me ask myself if I really believe in "talent," and it talent exists, if those who have it are obligated in some way to use their talent because of the people around them who wish they have it. And Zarr's book also made me ask myself about my own writing "talent." Am I using it well? When does the gift become a burden? Would I rather give it up and live a normal life?

Caitlen Rubino-Bradway's Ordinary Magic


This book was a fun romp through a world in which there are very few "ords," people who cannot do and are unaffected by magic. I loved the extensive world-building here. Abby's world is in the midst of an enormous change. Ords are still disliked, but the king has demanded that they can no longer be sold and has spent a great deal of money in creating a school especially for ords. But old habits die hard, and there are still those out there who want to buy ords, no matter what the king says. When Abby is kidnapped by one of them, she has to figure out how to save herself without any magic, just her own wits and courage.

I found myself liking the world so much that I immediately wanted to hear other stories. I wanted to read a YA fantasy romance written from the pov of Abby's older sister, who clearly has a great story going with the king. I wanted to hear more about Abby, but also about Peter, the rich kid who has been dropped suddenly by his parents and has a rather nasty temper. I wanted to hear about the cook who enters competitions with magical cooks and beats them because she doesn't follow the rules. You get the idea. I'd use this book as an example in a class. So many writers think that worldbuilding has to be done as it is done in a lot of adult sf/f, with info-dumping. Not so. We have a single pov character here and we find out everything we need to know about this world from her pov without it ever slowing down the plot.