Strings

July 3, 2017
Edwards follows two would-be lovers through three decades in this lovely tale of pining and performance. The snobs of a ritzy 1960s Southern California boarding school are scandalized when Olivia de la Vega, a cleaning lady’s daughter, is cast as the female lead in the school musical. Her first rehearsal stuns her classmates with her talent and catapults costar Ted Spencer into love. Ted’s snooty parents conspire to end the relationship but begrudgingly allow him to break the family’s Yale tradition to pursue his violin training at Juilliard. As he finds massive professional success as a violinist, Olivia becomes a famous movie star, and their paths continue to cross at intervals that never seem to have the right timing for a relationship to blossom. Ted narrates the story, slowly revealing how Olivia figured into his acquisition of a priceless violin that was assumed to have been destroyed. This one-sided perspective obscures some of Olivia’s story but creates a lovely picture of pining and frustrated desire. Edwards’s prose glides as smoothly as Ted’s playing as she articulates how deeply teen love shapes her characters’ adult lives. Readers wanting to dwell on the melancholy of ill-timed loved will devour this beautiful novel.