A review by kamin8882
Symphony of Secrets by Brendan Slocumb

adventurous challenging emotional hopeful informative inspiring mysterious reflective relaxing 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? It's complicated

5.0

 “Josie, we’ve been over this. You know people won’t want your music if they knew you were colored” I don’t believe you, she thought, they love the music because it has all the colors.” 
 
Brendan Slocumb is now officially an auto buy author for me. After reading The Violin Conspiracy earlier this year, I was so excited to read another brilliant book by him. 
 
This book is written beautifully- I love the format so much. It is broken up into “acts” like an opera or a play would be, alternating between present day timeline from Bern’s POV, and the 1920’s where we get Freds POV and a little of Josephine. I love dual timeline books, especially when one timeline helps answer questions from the other. Amazing !! 
 
I love feeling things when I read (don’t we all) and this book definitely gave me the feels. Joy when Josephine described how she heard the music, anticipation when Bern and Eboni started unraveling all the secrets, anger with the way poor Josephine was being used by a selfish white man- sooo many things! Happiness, sadness, anxiety, relief. . . this book was much more than a musical mystery. It was about honoring an amazing beautiful woman and fighting for what is right. I truly loved this book so much. I wish I could hear what Josephine heard. 
 
Also- can I add how much I loved the badass female characters in this book. Josephine was so pure and intelligent and I love that he represented her autism in such a beautiful way. And EBONI! She was a force to be reckoned with and would not let anyone tell her otherwise. And who else is crazing NY pizza after this ? Just me? 
 
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