Stradivarius
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
An inspirational story of love and the transforming power of music, Stradivarius is a novel that will engage and delight everyone who believes that wonderful things can happen to good people.
On the Korean peninsula during the freezing winter of 1951, a wounded American soldier finds a rare violin in the wall of a farmhouse where he has taken refuge. This is the beautifully told story of how a centuries old Stradivarius came to be in that unlikely place and how it changed the life of all those who possessed it. For this great instrument carries a kind of magic and all who use it are wrapped in its spell.
This is also the story of two families from different cultures and different parts of the world: one rural, Baptist, Southern; the other, sophisticated, European, Jewish. The link between them is an abiding love of great music, possession of the violin, and the boy genius from the mountains of West Virginia, Ailey Barkwood.
The remarkable route by which the violin reaches Ailey's talented hands, the course of love between two special but very different young people, and how great music, real genius and moral choices can alter destiny are the ingredients that make Donald Ladew's tale a novel that can be read,reread and remembered.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Charmingly predictable and predictably charming, this first novel tells of a boy, his violin and, inevitably, a girl. Ladew starts with the creation in 1685 of the wondrous violin dubbed ``Hercules'' by the Master of Cremona himself. The narrative then divides. Short interludes follow the history of the instrument as it changes hands, moving from Italy to France to Russia. These vignettes are peopled by stock-figure musicians-brilliant, eccentric, egotistical-and while they spice up the narrative with exotic locales and accents, they detract from the main plot. The central story is that of the orphan Ailey Barkwood, prodigy violinist from the backwoods of West Virginia, whose sterling qualities would put the Hardy Boys to shame. Ailey is clearly the most outstanding violinist to come down the pike, at least in Luthersville, W. Va., but he's too humble to allow people to call him a virtuoso. He's also too proud to accept the well-meant charity of his maestro, the kindhearted but crochety Joachim Everade. Ailey falls in love with a young French musician, Lucienne Ysaye, also a student of Everade's, and their affair brings together the old musical world of the maestro and Lucienne's family with the rural upstanding world of Miss Iris, Ailey's adopted mother, and of Martin Luther Cole, Korean War veteran and Ailey's surrogate father. Cultural clashes lead to important life lessons for all involved, with the two stories-Ailey's and the violin's-tying together for a heartwarming finish. There's not very much here that resembles real life; perhaps that's why the story is so comforting.
