Well-written, with small errors.

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jsmithy332 Avatar

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This book, and "Sweet Sorrow" by David Nicholls, are my two most recent reads, and it's annoying that both books have narrators / authors / book editors who apparently don't know when you should say "so-and-so and me" instead of "so-and-so and I." It's just fundamental, basic grammar, and when you understand it it's basically impossible to make the mistake, so why do they do it? Annoying. Especially in a well-written book that includes the rather pretentious, precious affectation of spelling "minuet" as if it were German, "menuett." Yes, the Mozarts spoke German but *this* book is in English. And minuets come from France, and most people spoke French in society, and the Mozarts went around speaking French, so why, what's the point?

There are also one or two points in the first third of the book where the word "to" is missing. It's not a stylistic thing, it's just a clearly missing word. Maybe the author or editors did a universal find-and-replace thingie and inserted mistakes at the same time they corrected them? ALSO, maybe 50 or 70 pages from the end there is a short sentence that means ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. It's just five or seven words that don't mean anything at all. It was empty verbiage, and since I can't read the author's mind there was no way to know what the author was trying to say.

Anyway, I wanted to read this because it is basically well-written, and I figured I would enjoy the fairy-tale tone of the writing. What I enjoyed mostly was actually the true story of the brother and sister, and their relationship. We really only see Mozart as a young, innocent boy. There's not a lot of complexity to him. But I enjoyed how he related to his older sister.

I think the book could have been better if it didn't involve fantasy--the real story of these two people is so engaging. And some of the fantasy didn't make a lot of sense--painfully winsome details about "star fishers" fishing for, I don't know, humans in the land of fantasy. Sort of pointless and out of place.

The land of fantasy doesn't really make sense unless it's completely metaphorical, and if it's completely metaphorical the story doesn't really make sense. Fundamentally, the land of fantasy has to be something real to mean something.