Between the Notes

Will Parker doesn't know a single soul on Maple Street.

His family just moved to town after his dad lost his job, and between a new school where he doesn't fit in and trumpet practice that's the only thing that still feels like home, the summer was shaping up to be a lonely one. Then a moving truck pulls up across the street, carrying a grand piano and the meanest old woman Will has ever met.

Patricia Anderson doesn't want visitors. She doesn't want her lawn mowed, her fence painted, or an eleven-year-old boy staring at her piano through the window. But Will keeps showing up anyway, mowing a lawn nobody asked him to mow, asking questions she doesn't want to answer, until one Saturday she does something neither of them expects: she offers to teach him.

What starts as a few piano lessons becomes something neither of them planned on. Will learns that the piano in her window once belonged to a man named Malcolm, a pianist Patricia loved and lost, and that music was the last thing keeping his memory close. Patricia learns that a persistent, trumpet-playing kid from across the street might be exactly what she didn't know she needed.

Between the Notes is a story about the families we build when we're not looking for them, about music as a way of holding on to the people we've lost, and about how the smallest, most stubborn kindnesses can end up changing an entire year, an entire life, for two people who never meant to need each other.

For readers who loved Bridge to Terabithia, Because of Winn-Dixie, or The Thing About Jellyfish, this is a story that will make you want to call the people you love, just to say so.