The Sound Between the Notes

The Sound Between the Notes is Probst's second novel. It's framed around a middle-aged woman, who gave up her career as a concert pianist to raise a family, and now has a second-chance at a prestigious concert, only to find a hereditary disease affecting her hand which may not only rob her of the chance but brings up painful memories of the birth mother who gave her up for adoption and a sister she never knew she had. Women's fiction at its most lyrical and poignant. Highly recommended if you love beautifully-written prose that explores a women's deepest fears and longing, both for a family to belong to but also fulfillment of her own strong need to express herself through her work.

Solid Story, Could Have Used Better Structure. This was a solid story of a woman trying to find herself after putting her career on pause to raise her kid and give him a life she had never had. For me, though, the structure of the storytelling itself would have dramatically benefited from a slight variation of the technique here. Here, we get a mostly dual timeline story, a bit scattered at times (date stamps alone would have been useful in that regard, even if just “x years ago”) but workable. What really could have elevated this story though would have been to take a page from another tale of another professional struggling to find his way and looking back on his life - Billy Chapel in the movie version of For Love Of The Game. (We shall not speak of the book - one of very few cases where the movie is by far the superior story.) There, the story is told in the same dual timeline approach that we get here - but with both timelines happening before the seminal event (in that case, the last game Billy Chapel will ever pitch as a professional baseball player, in this case an important concert), then some follow-up after the event itself. Ultimately just a tweak, though a significant one, that would have made the story flow so much better for at least this reader. Still, truly a worthy read and very much recommended.