Book Review//O, The Brave Music by Dorothy Evelyn Smith

Ruan Ashley is a sharp, observant child coming of age before the first World War. She narrates O, The Brave Music and the nostalgic, yearning tone pulls the reader into her life. It is a life full of tragedy but somehow the tragedy does not dominate. Ruan is the child of two mismatched parents. They loved each other in the beginning but now are tearing each other apart. We see their lives through Ruan’s eyes and slowly, as she grows, gain a clearer understanding of the relationships she is surrounded by.

Ruan is intelligent, imaginative, and a lover of books and words.

Words. They have always been the very stuff of my life. Lovely, shining words, in whose fire the tongue may burn and yet be unscarred; at whose trumpets the heart lifts to ecstasy or falls to hell; in whose colour, shape, and texture the mind sinks, drowned in beauty….

She also deeply cares about places; the Manse she lived in with her parents, Cobbetts–her uncle’s home, the farm on the moors she stays at regularly. All these places shape who she is and what she loves. She is a child who sees what she is surrounded by and does not simply exist in it. I love her description of a special evening with her mother.

It was lovely to lie on the rug before the fire, tired after the walk and stuffed with buttered toast, listening to Mother’s voice. The story didn’t matter much; it was the pattern the words made, weaving in and out of the flickering flames, and dropping like jewels, and rising like coloured bubbles, and darting like silver swords about the quiet room. The gas sang and popped in its little white incandescent towers. The Venetian blinds were down, fold upon fold against the dark February night. John snored and twitched in his dreams. The clock ticked contentedly. The head of the little mandarin on the mantelpiece nodded as some great dray-horse thundered down St Mark’s Road. It was all safe and warm and happy. There was no Dover Street, no hard-faced Captain; nothing there that could hurt us, snugly together in the warm room, with Mother’s voice going on and on.

One constant in Ruan’s life is her friendship with David. He is five years older than her but they have an immediate connection and stay close despite separation and different stages of their lives. Ruan loves David dearly and lives for the times they can be together. Ruan tells her story herself and through it is a yearning love for David; almost a feeling of love for something or someone who is gone. We are never clearly told about their lives after the end of the story and the nostalgic yearning does leave the reader wondering what happened to both of them.

O, The Brave Music gives the reader the feeling of listening to someone reminiscing about their past. It is a slice of Ruan’s life and Ruan herself comes alive but many of the other characters felt a bit formulaic. While there were a ridiculous number of deaths in the book (I think counted 8 or 9) many of them did not seem that tragic because the characters were not fleshed out. It was tragedy at a distance.

I have seen several reviews that have compared O, The Brave Music to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is definitely the better book in my opinion. Part of that may be because I have loved it for years and it is part of my reading identity but part of it is because much as I loved the descriptions and the language in O, The Brave Music I never completely fell in love with the characters. I felt I should be moved by them more than I actually was moved by them. I also frequently felt like Ruan and David did not behave in age-typical ways. I kept forgetting how young they were supposed to be. I almost feel the book would have worked better if they had each been aged up about five years by the end.

This sounds very unenthusiastic and that is not an accurate reflection of my feelings about the book. I enjoyed it. I put it on my shelf and will probably reread it one of these days. I would happily read more books by this author. I loved some of the descriptive language. I think it is simply that I was expecting it to be one of those books I hug to my chest and declare to be a new favorite and it wasn’t. It was, however, a good, well-written book and at the end of the day that is frequently more than enough.

My thanks to the publisher for providing a copy of the book.