Off My Rocker

Tessa, the last of the House of Pfaffenstein; a descendant of Charlemagne; raised in a grand castle; her friends, family and acquaintances princes, archduchesses and barons(her cousin Pippi is Pope) has fallen on hard times and left Schloss Pfaffenstein to Serve Art in Vienna as the under wardrobe mistress in a third-rate opera company full of comical characters. There's the director who is just a step ahead of the bailiffs; his soprano wife who is past her prime; the conductor who has been writing a symphonic masterpiece...for years. Then there are the opera dancers...

Guy Farne, unworthy former foundling from Newcastle-on-Tyne, once wooed and lost a young lady whose aunt was an Honorable. Now that the lady is a widow Guy decides to woo her once again and begins by re-creating the venue in which they met – the Vienna Opera. Enter our third-rate opera company and Schloss Pfaffenstein which Guy, having made his fortune in South American mining thereby becoming Worthy, has just bought.

This story of loves lost and found in the most unlikely places is sweet and sentimental but neither silly nor boring. Ibbotson brings to it a broad knowledge and love of music and undeniably charming story telling skills. A gentle read.

THE DEVIL IN MUSIC, by Kate Ross

If you like Regency Novels, music, convoluted mysteries, and/or lush depiction of setting this one’s for you. Regency dandy Julian Kestrel has successfully tried his hand at sleuthing in England. Now that he is traveling the Continent he reads of the four-year-old murder, recently uncovered, of someone he used to know so he goes to Milan to investigate - whether anyone wants him to or not. Hm-m-m, hadn’t Kestral appeared on the British Social Scene about four years previously?

The reader is introduced to the world of Italian opera, including the life and loves of a Castrato.

Ross only wrote four books, all of them about Kestrel, before she died of cancer at far too young an age. In this one she answers questions about Kestrel’s origins.

SONG FOR THE BASILISK, Patricia McKillip

McKillip is simply one of the best writers of fantasy I know. In Song she writes of the power of music to make us forget and to make us remember; to heal and to kill.

Rook remembers little of his past save for faint memories of fire and smoke. Taken in by the bards of Luly, he attends their school of music, marries and begets a child. He is prepared to live happily ever after until his past, in the form of the House of the Basilisk, reaches out to haunt him.