12-year-old Allegra Shapiro is looking forward to a long and leisurely summer vacation. She’s been short stop in the school softball team and they’d practised hard and done well for the season. But during her first music lesson of the summer, her violin teacher drops a bombshell on her: she’s made the Finals of a prestigious violin competition, to be held on Labour Day. Is she willing to play Mozart’s Fourth Concerto in D a thousand times before then?

Allegra can’t believe she’s made it to the Finals—she’d forgotten all about it with the softball and end of year school exams. How would she feel if she had to spend the whole of her summer practising one particular piece? But then her two best friends are away for the summer. What else is there for her to do? More to the point, does she love Mozart enough to spend her precious summer with him for hours on end every single day?

But then her life revolves around music anyway, with both her parents being professional musicians, though they put no pressure on her and allow her to make her own decision. Then her mother’s friend, Deidre, a beautiful soprano, comes to sing in the local college. She confesses to Allegra that she has such bad stage fright that she throws up before each performance. Indeed, she breaks down while staying with Allegra’s family. And yet, she sings so very beautifully at the concert. Then there’s the homeless man who turns up at all the summer concerts and dances so elegantly on his own.

From Deidre, Allegra learns some truths about music—how it comes from within us and how we must interpret it our own way— helping her in her understanding of performing. And from the homeless man with his seemingly hopeless quest for a lost song, Allegra learns dedication and determination.

But she seems to have taken a wrong turn with her approach to the concerto, and how can one possibly unlearn something and learn it a different way altogether? Especially when the competition is just around the corner? Will Allegra find her own music in time to play in honour of her long dead great-grandmother, the one for whom she is named? The one whose heritage she carries through her Bubbe Raisa, never mind the fact that Allegra’s half-and-half, a ‘thing that cannot be’?

The Mozart Season is a beautiful account of a young girl’s summer of discovery (of music, of life’s various joys and tragedies, of herself) where her musical talent and her empathetic nature guide her intuitively to a host of insights that lay open the mysteries of the adult world to a child. The author has remarkably and beautifully captured the workings of the mind of a precocious child on the brink of adolescence, one whose musical talents are burgeoning. Just as the multi-hued roses bloom riotously long into the season in her beloved hometown of Portland, Allegra’s moving, faceted, coming-of-age occurs in a hectic yet tender, long drawn-out summer.

The Mozart Season is a novel that will appeal particularly to musical teens and pre-teens, though any reader, musical or not, will find it moving and unforgettable. Highly recommended.