SOLO

A small-town Irish teen grapples with a breakup and a family health scare, both of which affect her passion for music.

The book opens during a hot August on Daisy’s 18th birthday, although she feels too miserable to enjoy the celebration. David is her second love after the recorder, but now he’s broken up with her. When school begins, Daisy meets new classmate Flora, who’s 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 (“Lost in his dreams / Neglecting my own”) and stopped practicing. Depressed about her father’s 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’s realistically both acutely self-aware and obliviously immature. The verse’s musicality is natural and a well-executed pairing with Daisy’s 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’Brien accurately captures a time in a person’s life that is so fragile and overwhelming that it’s nearly impossible to get just right.

A tightly written, incredibly well-characterized work: bravo.