The Color of Sound
by Emily Barth Isler
Intermediate, Middle School    Carolrhoda    336 pp.
3/24    9781728487779    $19.99

At twelve years old, Rosie is a violin prodigy who can hear whole works of music in her head and has played Carnegie Hall twice. She also has synesthesia and can see music in colors, textures, temperature, and taste, but she keeps it to herself, because her mother already finds her prodigy brain “weird” and “dangerous.” Their relationship is strained, as Mom is overly involved in managing Rosie’s musical career. Tired of being known as “the girl with the violin,” Rosie decides to quit playing in order to find herself and spends the summer at her grandparents’ home in Connecticut, where her grandmother is dying. Wandering the property, she enters an abandoned shed, where she discovers a girl who turns out to be her mother when she was Rosie’s age. Through repeated encounters, Rosie learns more about her family’s history, including her great-grandparents’ experience in Auschwitz and in a displaced persons camp after WWII. Suddenly, her mother’s obsession with the violin is put into a larger family context that intersects with a hidden history of musical talent, neurodivergence, and a Jewish identity that was kept secret. An emotionally moving story about the ways that generational trauma can affect parent-child relationships and how the past persists into the present.

From the May/June 2024 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.