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.