Book-Reviews

Playing for the Commandant, by Suzy Zail; Candlewick Press: Massachusetts, 2014; $16.99 When Suzy Zail, author of Playing for the Commandant, details how Hanna, our young Jewish protagonist, was shipped with her family to the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, I couldn’t help but remember Anne Frank, whose life after her diary ended was very similar to Hanna’s. But Hanna, unlike Anne (who later died in a German camp), survives the horrible ordeal. How does she manage to live in such a place, with exhausting labor, barely any food, and brutal captors? She plays piano. Before the war, she had been an accomplished concert pianist. At the camp, she is forced to play for the commandant, the merciless warden. It promises her a break from labor and a few extra morsels of food but is just as dangerous as the camp. The punishment for a wrong note? Losing a finger. Any other offense? Death. Staying alive won’t be easy, but Hanna will make it somehow. Thrown into the mix is the commandant’s moody son, Karl, who spends his time slouched in a chair, secretly admiring Hanna. Talk about unlikely love. Zail’s gruesome descriptions of life in Auschwitz are moving and inspiring. Hanna’s first-person narration is a great choice, because it makes the horrors even more vivid and heart-wrenching. When Hanna smuggles a broken piano key into the camp, it is clear to the reader that the key is a metaphor for her comfortable middle-class life back home in Hungary. A tale of woe is transformed into a tale of resilience when it is narrated by Hanna. Yet even more riveting than the details of the killing, the starvation, and the pain are the stories of friendship at the camp. In Auschwitz, it’s a dog-eat-dog world. But where there is dark, there is love, and hearing about Hanna embracing her older sister, Hanna comforting her ill mother, and Hanna being comforted by a servant girl in the commandant’s house is Zail’s way of promising light at the end of the tunnel. Throughout the book, Hanna gradually finds ways to rebel. First, it’s giving her sister a morsel of extra bread. Then, it’s sneaking stolen food from the commandant’s kitchen into the laundry delivery to Auschwitz. A startling (and to the reader, unsettling) crescendo to this is the secret romance she shares with Karl. Hanna is also unsettled by this, and it is an interesting look at how little we can control our emotions. Although Karl’s father is responsible for the gas chambers, the killings, and the horrific cruelties at the camp, Hanna still loves him, though not without a bit of guilt. This concept of emotions taking over is something that Zail handles deftly, never once stumbling on any aspect. It makes for a very readable, beautifully written, hard to put down book that should be required reading for anyone interested in World War II or Anne Frank, and even for those who have never heard of the Holocaust. It mixes pain with love, romance with suffering, and survival with history in a book where life conquers all. Sophie Beatrice Cooper, 12New York, New York

Mountain Solo, by Jeanette Ingold; Harcourt, Inc.: New York, 2003; $17 When I first read the back cover of the book, I was so thrilled. Since I began playing the cello seriously, I have been looking for a book that describes the life and feelings of an instrumental soloist. Jeanette Ingold’s main character does not play the cello, but violin was close enough to get me excited. The author wove such an interesting and emotional story of a girl that I read the book in one sitting. I remember not budging for several hours to finish that 3oo-page book that I just could not put down. Tess Thaler has lived as a virtuoso-to-be since she first picked up the violin at age three. When she is twelve, Tess moves, with her mom, from her hometown in Montana to New York City to attend a prestigious music school for even more vigorous training. When I read that part, I thought of how hard it must be to be separated from your dad. Like Tess, I’m as close to my dad as I am to my mom. When Tess is sixteen, her mom encourages her to participate in a contest for the chance to perform with one of Germany’s finest orchestras. After winning the competition, she makes a debut in front of thousands in Germany. Unfortunately, Tess was not ready; it was her mom’s idea, not hers. Her first note comes out wrong, and that one mistake leads to many others throughout the piece. I think that any person who ever performed on any kind of stage knows how Tess felt at that debut. It reminds me of my audition for a special music school; how I was so nervous my hands were turning all numb and blue, how I could hardly play my cello, and how, like Tess, my first mistake led to another, and another. After her would-be debut, Tess throws away all the glamour, practice, and years of hard work and returns to her dad and stepfamily in Montana without her mom. I would think that many people would not be able to understand why Tess would have done this, but I know. Sometimes, after a bad concert or audition, I feel so frustrated and disappointed in myself that I want to renounce the cello. Even though the absence of violin had left Tess with time to spare, her days were soon filled with finding the lost homestead of a pioneer named Frederick Bottner who, like Tess, played the violin. With her archaeologist stepmother, Tess visits Frederick’s surviving daughter in the hospital and quickly gets entangled in searching for the key to the pioneer’s life. Tess draws the inspiration to pick up the violin again through this mysterious pioneer who lived more than a century ago. She finds out that the people who came to her concert had not wanted to hear her play; they just wanted to hear the music. She also figures out that her mother didn’t force her to do anything. Tess just wanted someone to blame. She denied that she had made mistakes, which everyone does. But by admitting to her mistakes, Tess eventually matures to show us that we shouldn’t be afraid to try again after we slip. Through this book, I learned that the greatness of a musician is never determined by their technical ability or how many competitions they win, but how much love for music that person has. Mountain Solo by Jeanette Ingold is a highly entertaining book that I think everyone would enjoy, musician or not. Sohee Kim, 12Scarsdale, New York