24. The Music Teacher

Book 24: The Music Teacher by Barbara Hall (C+)

Um yeah, not that great. The story begins in the first person with a violin teacher living in the Los Angeles area describing how she promised never to be "that cranky woman you remember from your youth, the one whose face you dreaded seeing, whose breath you dreaded smelling..." (1). When a talented beyond her years student enters the picture, the teacher tries to force the girl to have the same go-for-the-gold dreams as the teacher had before she resigned to teaching. Then, the girl's family life isn't all it's cracked up to be and the teacher "cares too much" or something like it and involves Social Services to which the girl lies and says that the teacher went too far psychologically with her. It was just plain strange.

I guess a couple of lines from Chapter 9 explain it better: "The bottom line is this: life is about people interacting with one another. When people resist doing that, they go a little crazy" (143). This teacher completely ignores society. And, she does go a bit nuts.
I couldn't identify with any of the characters, not even the student whose attitude about life was just dumb. I don't know how this author writes young adult novels when she clearly doesn't understand young adults. At least not young adults on my side of the country. Maybe there are 14-year-olds like that in LA... In that case, I'm most certainly afraid!
Perhaps it is a better book for the reader who can play an instrument and understands that need to make sound. For me, who has failed at piano and the clarinet, I was completely bored from the beginning to the end. The only thing interesting about this story is that the actual book was published in Chapel Hill, North Carolina!

Works Cited:

Hall, Barbara. The Music Teacher. Chapel Hill: Algonquion Books of Chapel Hill, 

2009. Print.