I’m always excited for a new Barbara Kingsolver novel, and though I haven’t loved all of them, I’ve loved many of them. Demon Copperhead and Poisonwood Bible are probably my two favorites, but so many others are also excellent, inventive, and memorable. Partita is no exception. It’s beautiful and tragic, it contains love, heartbreak and loss, gives us rural Tennessee farming equally as compelling as the halls and practice rooms on a college campus. But at its heart, it’s the passion for music that drives the story: the piano contains all the emotional power to drive a human forward. And Kingsolver can pull this off because she was an Appalachian girl who went to college on a piano scholarship and has played (and written) ever since. 

The story takes place over the course of a week, when Livia, the narrator in her mid 40’s, gets a phone call from her college boyfriend while she’s in the midst of cleaning out her mother’s house of hoarded stuff. Which then takes us back and forth from her college life of piano and starstruck love to her current life of farming and stability. 

We know from the beginning that she did not become a concert pianist and that she did not stay with Sigurd, her college lover, but for a long time, we don’t know why. Somewhere in the middle, the story does drag a bit and feels a smidgeon too heavy-handed, but just when I felt this way, it moved on. 

Kingsolver writes so beautifully about music–the technique, the composition, the stories, the emotion, the intricate challenges of each piece. What a joy to get a narrated tour through it all. And she offers similar details with dairy farming and neighbors and community and a dysfunctional mother and putting the pieces of a life back together. 

Many sentences and sections are worth marking and rereading. Also, the book comes with a Spotify playlist which was delightful to take in at just the appropriate time in the narrative. 4.5⭐️