I had piano lessons for part of middle and high school. My second-grade teacher, who was really primarily a music teacher, came to my house once a week and taught me and Social Sister how to play. I was okay. I have big hands, so that was good, but I never had a really good feel for the way the music flows. If I were wealthy, I’d probably buy a piano and take it up again, but it would be, like, a slightly shabby upright piano. Anything fancier would hastily out-fancy my ability to play.

The Lucy Variations (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository) is about a girl whose ability to play cannot be outfancied by even the fanciest of grand pianos. Lucy Beck-Moreau is the scion of a piano playing legacy, her grandfather’s great hope. By the time she’s a teenager, she’s won more major piano-playing contests than you can shake a stick at, and there seems to be nothing that can stop her musical career. Until she walks away from her piano at a competition in Prague and never plays another note.

Eight months later, her little brother, Gustav, has become the flagship of the family. When his piano teacher dies in their living room, the family has to hire a new teacher: a man called Will who becomes the first person ever to ask Lucy, What do you love?, and to remind her that she once played music for love, not for obligation.

I am very torn on The Lucy Variations! On one hand, I was completely engaged when I was reading it; I wanted to get back to it when I was away. On the other hand, there were a lot of times when I could not tell what Sara Zarr’s attitude toward her characters was, and what my own attitude toward them was supposed to be. For instance, Lucy is a dreadful friend. Just awful. She has two main friends, Carson and Reyna, and she regularly asks more of them than she gives. Although they each bring this up to her in the course of the book, and she does not seem to think it is false, it doesn’t engender in her any sense of obligation.

Or another thing: The book does not seem to acknowledge the genuine harm that Will does to Lucy by failing to set appropriate boundaries. I know Sara Zarr knows what the appropriate boundaries are, because Lucy’s English teacher more or less sets them. Will does not; it is shitty. I was uncomfortable with Will from the get-go. It’s established early on that Lucy looks older than her age, and I never liked Will’s way of singling her out and making her something more than a student’s sister, or even a student herself. The book doesn’t give him a pass on all fronts, but I think it gives him too much of a pass on this front.

Or another thing again: Lucy’s social strangeness is pretty obvious as you’re reading the book. The idea is that Lucy’s music required a schedule that a regular school would not have permitted; so she had tutors for a great deal of her career. She’s more comfortable with grown-ups than with kids her own age, and she has a habit of developing crushes on men who are much older. I’d have loved Lucy’s process of self-discovery—which focuses almost exclusively on whether and how she wants to approach music going forward—to include some changes on the social strangeness front. That would have been an interesting plotline, right? How to figure out social norms when they haven’t been bred in you beforehand? But no, there’s really none of that.

This is one of those reviews that came out much more negative than my actual experience of reading the book. I liked reading it! I think Sara Zarr is a tremendous YA author who should be more famous than she currently is. However, The Lucy Variations is not her greatest success with character consistency and so forth.

Here then is the now-definitive ranking of Sara Zarr’s books, from worst to best. I will revise as needed when she writes more books in the future. Coauthored books don’t count; that is a whole other thing.

1. Story of a Girl
2. Once Was Lost / What We Lost
3. The Lucy Variations
4. Sweethearts
5. How to Save a Life

This holds true whether or not you account for the fact that Once Was Lost turned out to be the straw that broke the camel’s back as regards missing white girls. So there you go. If you want to love Sara Zarr, start with Sweethearts or How to Save a Life, but do be aware that you’re starting with the best ones, and the other books won’t be quite that awesome.

Cover report: American cover wins because it has an actual piano on it, and I like the title font slightly better.

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After two failed Sara Zarr attempts that in no way soured me on her, my loyalty has finally paid off in How to Save a Life. The story is told from two points of view (yay): Jill, a high school senior who lost her father in a car accident, and Mandy, a pregnant eighteen-year-old who has agreed to give her baby to Jill’s middle-aged mother for adoption. Mandy wants a good home for her baby but refuses to involve any lawyers or social workers, and Jill–who has been pretty much nonstop furious since her father’s death–is convinced that Mandy is trying to pull a scam on Jill’s vulnerable mother.

“Your mom does what she does, damn the torpedoes,” he used to say.

 

“Your mom’s a nut,” he used to say. “I’m just along for the ride.”

 

I mean, I get it. I sort of get it. She’s not just doing this because she wants a baby, though I think she really does. She’s doing this to say a big eff you to fate, or God, or luck, or whatever it is that took Dad away from us. I dare you, she’s saying. I dare you.

As in Sweethearts, the key to everything here is Sara Zarr’s assumption of the good will of all parties. That Jill doesn’t trust Mandy hurts Mandy’s feelings; yet you know that if it were you, and your mother, you wouldn’t be able to trust Mandy either. On both sides, the adoption depends utterly on both sides–Mandy and Robin, Jill’s mother–to count absolutely on the other one’s good faith. And as much as they both want the adoption to go through smoothly, there are times when they waver.

Another thing Sara Zarr portrays perfectly is the gap between Mandy and Jill. It’s not just financial, although it is financial; and it’s not just intellectual, although it is intellectual. Their life experiences have been so different that they might as well have come from different planets. Jill has always been able to count on the support and love of her parents; Mandy never. What’s regular to Jill is a shock and a luxury to Mandy, and it’s easy for Jill to sneer at Mandy’s tastes, and for Mandy to feel that everything has come easy for Jill.

The danger of a book where everyone’s sympathetic is that you’ll end up with a character or two who’s just too saintly. In How to Save a Life, that was Jill’s boyfriend Dylan. I could have lived without Dylan. Dylan was so endlessly patient and caring and communicative, and I’d have liked to see what frayed edges there were on him (apart from a throwaway remark about him not being brave). But that is really my only complaint. Sara Zarr is quite wonderful, and I can’t recommend her enough.

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I actually bought this book mainly out of terror and dismay, as it sounded a lot like a story I’m in the process of drafting, and when I read about it I freaked out immediately and started having depressing dreams in which Sara Zarr (who looked a lot like Scheherazade from the TV movie of Arabian Nights, damn her) came and fussed at me for writing a lamer version of the exact same story she had written.   This isn’t very admirable and demonstrates deep insecurities and also a hitherto unacknowledged desire to look like Mili Avital, but there it is, that’s what I dreamed.

To my relief, this book is really nothing like my story at all, so Mili Avital/Sara Zarr/my mean old embarrassing grouch of a subconscious can just leave me alone.  It’s about a girl called Jennifer (hmph) who was a misfit outcast girl in elementary school and she had a best friend called Cameron and they were outcasts together, and then Something Happened when they were nine and Cameron left very unexpectedly and Jennifer recreated herself.  And named herself Jenna.  And then when she is seventeen, Cameron comes back.

(Please, like that’s an improvement.  There are other, better nicknames for Jennifer than that.  Just saying.)

I enjoyed this book.  Ms. Zarr (who incidentally doesn’t look any more like Mili Avital than I do except that she is brunette like Mili Avital and I have fair hair) writes excellent dialogue and genuine relationships which is often tricky.  And although I was extremely sleepy and I knew I would be losing an hour today, damn Daylight Savings Time, I nevertheless stayed up late and finished it in one sitting.  With, in the interests of full disclosure, some getting up and down for water and the bathroom and to brush my teeth and to check Woot and PostSecret.  I wasn’t wild about the last chapter – it seemed unconnected with the rest of the book, how suddenly we were leaping through enormous dollops of time in the narrator’s life and all kinds of shit happened in the intervening years, and – it was a bit jolting, and I thought, really, it could have been handled more smoothly.

But overall a thoroughly good book.  If I knew any teenage girls I would give them my copy.

Oh, hey, I do know a teenage girl.  Maybe I’ll give her my copy.

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