Three children run wild through the chestnut forests of central France, and somewhere in that wildness, something precious breaks. George Sand returned to her native Berry with this tender, aching novel about the friends Étienne, Brulette, and Joseph, whose childhood games give way to the first, devastating weight of love. Étienne loves Brulette. Brulette loves Joseph. The geometry of young hearts is brutal in its simplicity. Sand writes with the accumulated wisdom of someone who knows that first love rarely lands where we want it to. The rural setting is no pastoral backdrop: the forests, the seasons, the village rhythms shape these characters as surely as their own desires. The master pipers of the title, those wandering musicians who carry old songs through the countryside, become a kind of refrain for everything the characters cannot say aloud. This is Sand at her most autobiographical, mourning what might have been while insisting that the loving itself was the thing worth having.
