Another Man with Another Violin
If The Man with the Violin has whet your appetite for another story about a man and a violin — and even if it hasn’t — I have to recommend Strong Hollow by Linda Little.
Strong Hollow shows how music comes to be a vital part of a young man’s life, even though (unlike Joshua Bell in The Man with the Violin) he has little talent. Jackson Bigney’s life is essentially a mess — until the day he decides to use his skills as a wood carver to see if he can restore a derelict fiddle.
I was strongly moved by this book and kept wanting to read passages out loud, because Linda Little is as fine a craftsperson with words as her character is with wood.
Lucky me, I’ll get to meet Linda this weekend at Read by the Sea in Tatamagouche.
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Kathy Stinson is the author of the classic Red Is Best and the award-winning The Man with the Violin. Her wide range of titles includes picture books, non-fiction, young adult fiction, historical fiction, horror, biography, series books, and short stories. She has met with her readers in every province and territory of Canada, in the United States, Britain, Liberia, and Korea. She lives in a small town in Ontario.
Read by the Sea is a great community of readers/writers. Maybe you'll get to visit Linda's pigs! Have fun!
I've never had pigs in an audience before. Maybe I could train them to squeal and squawk to go with the noisy subway pages of my reading. How's that for a silly idea?