The Soloist -- stated simply, a story of a child prodidy cellist who "loses" his ability to perform when he reaches adulthood and spends years in search of a way to recover his lost sense of identity -- is such a beautiful piece of writing that I am unable to do it justice, but I will try. The descriptive prose is like nothing I have ever seen. It astounds me. I find myself rereading passages just to savor the experience. Yet it is not the sort of writerly writing that gets in the way of a story. It is never showy or "outside" of the novel. Being a writer myself, I am naturally aware of "the writer", but only in the most positive sense. This author's storytelling ability is just amazing. There is never a moment when the reader isn't anxious to know what will happen next. One of my favorite aspects of the book is the main character's soul-searching -- his constant quest for meaning, for "the answers", and even "the questions". The underlying themes and messages of this novel apply to anyone, musician or not. It is, in part, a story of losing and searching to recover one's sense of identity, in this particular case by a boy whose original sense of identity was tied to his vision of himself as a concert cellist. There is so much to this book that it deserves more than one reading!

(from Amazon.com)

Released on Friday, December 10, 2004 at about 10:00:00 AM BX time (GMT-06:00) Central Time (US & Canada) at Salvation Army in Torrance, California USA.

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