New Book Review: A Kingdom Is Lost

Title: A Kingdom Is Lost, a Song Is Born 

Author: Steve Moretti

Date: 2019

Publisher: DWA Media

Quote: "St Clair had watched in horror every debate leading to this...final vote to accept Union with England." 

In 1707 England and Scotland formed the United Kingdom. The vote was not unanimous. And in a day when only a handful of the richest men had votes at all, how did people settle such weighty matters, demanding such clear thought and public spirit? By fighting and killing one another, of course. Building interest in nonviolent solutions seems to require the influence of women. Eighteenth century males feared few things more than a "petticoat government" that might have required them to reason about their differences rather than fight about them. So they settled things the breeches way (only working men, who had no vote, wore trousers). It cost them many lives, and money neither side could afford...

So, in this not-quite-novel, this series of vignettes published as a "prequel" to a trilogy of novels, three orphaned teenagers, who used to love each other as siblings ought, are set against each other by politics. Big brother James, whose character suffered from his becoming head of the clan in his teens, finds an influential job in the new government and naturally supports it. Baby brother George is a Jacobin who wants independence for Scotland. Sister Katharine just wants to compose music to play on her cello in peace--but the times won't allow any of them much peace.

In the novels, the anguish Katharine and the orphans' Aunt Margaret, who has lost two husbands and two children already, feel over the effects of war builds a time slip that relays their emotions to their descendants. Grandmother Margaret Rose has always been written off as a mental case because she so often dreams, waking or sleeping, about the moments of crisis in Katharine's and Margaret's lives. Granddaughter Adeena (Dee to friends) just wants to compose music, and although she composes in the modern style, she still feels that "the cello chose me." And when Dee gets her hands on Katharine's cello, a series of time travel adventures, in the Outlander mood, is about to begin.

The four chapters of "prequel" introduce the four women, their families, and their cellos. They weren't long enough to make an e-book so Moretti is circulating them together with four chapters of the first full-length book in the trilogy. 

I'm not familiar enough with British history to comment on the accuracy of the storyline. The story is well told, showing only the usual tendency of writers creating opposite-sex characters to overestimate the percentage of the opposite-sex brain devoted to thinking about the writer's half of humankind. I'm not wild about historical romances whose ending is part of their beginning--the prequel has already told us that Katharine's going to hide the cello and Dee's going to find it--but in this story the musical motif adds more than the usual amount of interest.

Given Amazon's interest in digital audio-books, you knew they'd be eager to publish books about music that are actually enhanced with music. Traditionally books about music had to print notation for the sounds the author intended to communicate, or else rely on subjective descriptions. of this song's wistful modal melody and that one's thundering bass chords. But why shouldn't audiobooks, when the author has told you "Mr. Darling was at the piano, writing a song about Cruella de Vil," pause to give you the actual sound of the piano picking out the melody and a man's voice singing the song? 

Moretti wrote this trilogy that way. You can read the traditional books that tell you about the classical pieces Katharine played and the modern pieces Dee composed, or you can listen to the audiobooks and hear their performances.. 

Still undecided? Visit stevemoretti.ca to read the prequel and join Moretti's e-mail list for free. I'm guessing that audio clips will tell you whether you want the full score of these novels.

Will Moretti transfer this pleasing new book concept to nonfiction? He's already written a biography of Tchaikovsky. With encouragement he might do more.