The book opens during a hot August on Daisy\u2019s 18th birthday, although she feels too miserable to enjoy the celebration. David is her second love after the recorder, but now he\u2019s broken up with her. When school begins, Daisy meets new classmate Flora, who\u2019s from Dublin and has her own passion for music as an alto in the choir. Their personalities are complementary, and they form a special, fateful relationship that grows to become fierce and protective, leaving them both deeply changed. Flora helps Daisy find her way back to the recorder; she became overly absorbed with David (\u201cLost in his dreams \/ Neglecting my own\u201d) and stopped practicing. Depressed about her father\u2019s cancer diagnosis and guilty about letting down her supportive parents by abandoning the recorder, Daisy struggles to return to music. Daisy is a believable, complex narrator, sitting at that tentative place between growing and being grown up. She\u2019s realistically both acutely self-aware and obliviously immature. The verse\u2019s musicality is natural and a well-executed pairing with Daisy\u2019s talent. Each poem has a brilliantly aligned (and briefly defined) musical term as its title, and many of the poems play meaningfully with shape and form. O\u2019Brien accurately captures a time in a person\u2019s life that is so fragile and overwhelming that it\u2019s nearly impossible to get just right.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The book opens during a hot August on Daisy\u2019s 18th birthday, although she feels too miserable to enjoy the celebration. David is her second love after the recorder, but now he\u2019s broken up with her. When school begins, Daisy meets new classmate Flora, who\u2019s from Dublin and has her own passion for music as an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":3030,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3029"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3029"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3029\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}