In post-Civil War Mississippi, seventeen-year-old Esther Powell bends over her violin in the candlelit parlor of her grandfather's plantation, the instrument her only escape from a world that expects her to be nothing more than a proper Southern belle. Her mother died believing Esther possessed a gift worthy of the concert halls of the North, and her grandfather, aging and solitary, has staked his last years on nurturing that dream. But the South of the 1870s offers few roads out for a woman with ambitions beyond marriage, and Esther finds herself caught between her grandfather's fierce love, the expectations of a changing society, and the haunting voice of her dead mother urging her toward a freedom that may cost everything. When a family friend, Glenn Andrews, enters their lives, Esther must choose between the safe tenderness of the life she knows and the terrifying unknown of her artistic destiny. Rives writes with sensitivity and restraint, capturing the particular ache of a young woman who can hear the music in her soul but cannot yet play it loudly enough for the world to listen.
