I confess that I didn't finish this book. It is a good book in some ways. A human-interest story of the first order, and a true story as well. Melanie Kupchynsky's father was known to both authors as a demanding, loud, unforgiving violin teacher. One doesn't need to read the second half of the book to tell that he had been a victim, traumatized, with stories of 1940s Ukraine too gruesome ever to tell a younger generation. One also sees from the beginning that he will lose his cherished younger daughter. The two authors build up this complex story by alternating their individual memories, from their youngest years onwards. It's a good read.
But I found it too easy to predict what was going to happen, and the emotions that would accompany. One gets the gist in the first 80 pages.
I am thoroughly in sympathy with the moral of the story: that you can achieve much more than you think, by dogged determination and self-discipline.
What finally decided me to quit, though, was this passage on page 81:
... the intellectually rigorous, often atonal, the-more-sterile-the-better challenge of contemporary music.Anyone who has spent serious time with the music of Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Bartok or late Stravinsky, not to mention less well-known composers such as Ruggles, Nancarrow or Bainbridge, will recognize the short-sightedness of such a phrase. The authors, like many others, closed their ears at the start to anything that was outside their comfort zone. I don't mind so much that these two authors overlooked a treasure, but they encourage others to feel that this viewpoint is the correct viewpoint and, actually, spinach IS bad for you because you didn't like it the first time you tasted it.
Unforgiveable.