Amazon.com Review
A symphony waiting to be heard by the right audience, this is Bruce Brooks's most challenging yet overlooked novel. Sibilance is a smart, well-adjusted musical prodigy with a father who adores her and gives her plenty of freedom. Sounds like a perfect life, doesn't it? However, even gifted teenagers need to break away to find their own independence. The marvel here is the way Brooks creates an authentic rite of passage for this complex, witty young woman. How do we move from the warm safety of love into deeper love? Brooks knows the way.
From School Library Journal
Grade 9-12 In The Moves Make the Man (Harper, 1984), Brooks used basketball as a metaphor to simplify his philosophical discussion and as a vehicle for unforgettably vivid writing; here he uses music for similar purposes. Although Sib, 16, has not seen her mother since the day she was born, she suddenly announces that she'd like to. She has an ulterior motive, but that's her style; a musical prodigy, she is ruthless, manipulative, indecently self-assured, impatient of others' flaws. Her father, Taxi, has his own style, and he takes her on a trip both actual and figurative, across the country, and back 15 years. He wants Sib to understand the spirit that captured her mother and him during the late 1960s; consequently, they travel in a 20-year-old VW bus, Taxi sings and speaks of that era at every opportunity, and he takes Sib to meet some of his old acquaintances on the way. Sib's mother turns out to be a wealthy real-estate agent with expensive tastes and no interest in music, quite comfortable in an upper-class milieu of money and power. Brooks plainly has points to make about the '60s and what happened to its survivors; by presenting Sib with such clear-cut alternatives, thoughbetween her mother, successful but hollow, and her father, an environmentalist whose idealism is battered but intacthe suggests that there is no middle ground. However simplistic his social theory, Brooks is a genuine storyteller, with fine dramatic sense and excellent comic timing. Like Moves , this is full of memorable scenes and magic moments, especially when music is being played or heard. Teenage readers may have trouble keeping up with Sib and Taxi as they skip from Haydn to Ellington to Shostakovich to Procol Harum, from new cadenzas to old riffs with the ease of long familiarity, but the author rewards the effort with a stimulating, thought-provoking tale. John Peters, New York Public Library
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
