Reviews with content warning for Physical abuse - Symphony of Secrets

4.5* Even if you didn't like The Violin Conspiracy (which I loved), you might still like this one. It's not technically noir, but has that vibe. While it is about a composer and music academia, it didn't feel as music heavy as the first one. I didn't understand a lot of the musical references in the first book, but I didn't have that problem here. I highly recommend this one (also The Violin Conspiracy if you haven't read it yet).

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fkshg8465's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This had a little bit of everything for me, and I loved the ending. I’m always rooting for the underdog, so for me, while the historical events were awful, I loved how Josephine got all that she wanted, even if that wasn’t how she wanted to get it.

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d_nice_'s review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

This book would have more compelling if it had been shorter. Bern was not a sympathetic protagonist and the contemporary part of the novel was too drawn out. Also, Eboni’s Bronx accent in the audiobook lacked authenticity.

Conversely, the black male protagonist doubting the sharp instincts of the black female supporting character was all too authentic.

I loved Josephine

and I’m glad she eventually asserted herself with Freddy

. But even the historical chapters could have been trimmed.

We get it, Freddy/Fred/Fredric was a dick and either didn’t believe or didn’t care that he exploited Josephine.

But how many chapters of proof did we need?

I stayed through the end but just to hear the conclusion. This easily could have been a DNF, and the book’s editor would have been just as if not more responsible for the abandonment than the author.

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thrillofthepage's review against another edition

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emotional inspiring mysterious sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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shirarweiss's review

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challenging dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

This book was suspenseful and compelling, and I wanted to know what happened next. However, I didn’t necessarily like it? It was really hard to read - it made me so upset. I just wanted to get through it. It did make me think a lot about music, artistry, history, power, and narrative control. I found Bern kind of annoying, and I was so angry about Josephine’s treatment that I could hardly read it. I want an entire book that’s just Josephine’s POV. I loved the dual timeline and multiple POVs.

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spuriousdiphthongs's review

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challenging mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

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rachelkreadsbookz's review against another edition

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mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

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evanmcomer's review

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dark emotional mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

Slocumb describes “Symphony of Secrets” as a musical thriller. However, the slow pace of the plot and the rushed pay-off at the end made this book just OK for me.

Let’s start with the good. For me, the strongest parts of Slocumb’s book were the chapters set in the 1920s. The author clearly did a lot of research and had a good feel for setting. The characters in that part of the book were richer and more fully drawn. And Josephine, who is neurodivergent, was written with significant care and depth. The book shines brightest when it’s in historical-fiction mode.

As for the bad, this book’s plot felt stagnant. It really only felt like a “thriller” in the last third. The rest seemed like set-up. The portions of the book written in modern times were slow, and Bern and Eboni were both less interesting than Josephine and Fred. Bern’s character arc, where he tries to navigate the internal politics of and comes to terms with the realities of the philanthropic organization for which he works, felt boring. The interesting parts of Eboni’s storyline all seem to happen off page. This meant that, for me, some of the big reveals that happened at the end of the book felt unearned.

As I said above, it wasn’t until about the last third of the novel that “Symphony of Secrets” lurched into the thriller genre. We see Fred’s psychological manipulation of Josephine transform into physical abuse. This all builds to Fred murdering Josephine and another music publisher in the final chapters of the book. That was also a deeply unsatisfactory development tor me. I never had any sense of justice or closure from this part of the story. The nuance that Slocumb used to show how Fred manipulated and gaslit Josephine at the beginning of the book fell by the wayside, and Fred spent the last part of the story being little more than a cartoon villain. Reading the end, it felt like the plot that Slocumb spent so much time setting up became too much for him to handle, so he opted for the most abrupt, shocking ending he could think of.

The Delaney Foundation, which Slocumb paints as a corrupt philanthropy project, was so exaggerated that it took me out of the story. If Kurt Delaney started twisting his mustache at some point in the book, I would not have been surprised. This really boils down to a problem of stakes. The basic conceit of the plot—a musical historian discovers that a famous composer stole his most famous works from a black woman–was strong enough. Giving the philanthropy trying to cover up that discovery the kind of reach that they could buy off the NYPD, pay criminals to hunt down the main character, and manufacture criminal charges against him ratcheted things up to a high enough level that I was no longer able to suspend my disbelief. While things like police corruption and the racism inherent in white philanthropy are real, a book about intellectual property theft doesn’t seem like the proper forum to address them. My brain just could not make sense of the idea that a nonprofit foundation would go to such extremes to protect a piece of classical sheet music—one that it intended to release to the public anyway!

Many of my negative feelings about the ending stem from Slocumb’s treatment of Josephine. While I think Slocumb wrote Josephine well by-and-large, he does give savant-like properties to her neurodivergence, which is a stereotype that is harmful to people living with Autism Spectrum Disorder and other conditions. And to make matters worse, he uses the richness of her character to set up her death. He wanted us to love Josephine and to see her complexities, only so he could make her a victim. Josephine really doesn’t get to tell her own story; she’s there so that Fred, Bern, and Eboni can tell it.

3.25⭐️

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