Ruth O

The book opens with a suicide and a short note: ‘He isn’t who you think he is’, written to the victim’s adult daughter. The rest of the book is the daughter’s present-day actions with flashbacks to her haunted youth, as she searches for who ‘he’ is. Along the way we learn how she came to be the person she is today. I read this book in one day, as it caught me from the first chapter and I couldn’t put it down. Some of it was predictable, but there were still surprises that kept me on edge. Character development occurred slowly, but it all made sense by the end. I recommend this for a quick but not easy read, as it deals with family issues that are very disturbing.

Music is a theme that runs through this book, appropriate for ‘The Music Teacher’! It’s about music, but not about music. The heroine has a lot of personal issues that intertwine with the music. The book had a bit too much angst for my taste, and the writing was in choppy sentences which is a style that generally doesn’t appeal to me. I finished it (luckily it was a short book), but it dragged on for a while without getting to the point. I wouldn’t read it again, nor would I recommend it to a friend.