By Hannah Fazendin
Midnight Hour Encores by Bruce Brooks is a young adult novel that I wish I had not missed as a young adult reader. Brooks elegantly crafts a beautiful tale of self-discovery and growth in the life of sixteen-year-old Sibilance T. Spooner. Sib faces the questions of her past and the promise of her future as she embarks on a journey westward to meet her mother for the first time and take a final leap toward establishing herself as one of the world’s greatest cellists.
Sib is a musical
prodigy who lives alone with her father Cabot Spooner whom she calls Taxi. The two maintain a relationship of
emotionally distant coexistence in which Sib keeps her brilliance to herself
while Taxi admires her talent and respects her privacy. Every so often, Taxi invites Sib to take a
trip from their home on the east coast to San Francisco to meet her mother, an
invitation that Sib consistently refuses until the beginning of Midnight Hour Encores.
The action of the novel begins with Taxi scouring the classifieds to the perfect ‘period’ vehicle to carry them cross-country, and begin the process of preparing Sib to understand her mother. Taxi is famous for his elaborate set ups designed to locate things within their contexts; in this case, Taxi needs to locate his explanation of why Sib’s mother rejected them within the context of the 1960’s. So Taxi purchases the most appropriate Volkswagon bus and filled it with the songs of 60’s hippies and rockers while briefing Sib on the political and social climate of the decade. In order to both further Taxi’s purpose and to keep Sib fresh with her cello, the two embark on a project of Sib writing a piece of music that incorporates all of the thoughts, feelings and events that Taxi describes.
Although Sib only reveals her desire to meet her mother to Taxi, she has another motive for heading out west. She has been offered the opportunity to audition before her most admired cellist in hopes of studying under him at the Phrygian Institute in California. Sib chooses to keep this audition a secret from her father because she fears the prospect of abandoning him for her own pursuits the way her mother had done years before.
As the novel continues, Sib reveals many aspects of her youth that were ignored due to her commitment to her music. She reflects on her inability to relate to her peers, missed chances at love, and a general discomfort in her own skin. At the same time, Sib begins to realize the daunting task that her father undertook when he committed to raising her alone and through his explanation of the 60’s, Taxi reveals a great deal about Sib’s upbringing that allows her to see the magic and success of their relationship. In the end, Sib is faced with the choice of living with her mother in California to study cello under her hero at Phrygian, thereby endorsing the self-centered lifestyle that allowed her mother to abandon her at birth, or to head back to the east coast with her father to study at Julliard.
Midnight Hour Encores is an
exceptionally entertaining novel that combines all the great elements of angst,
romance, drama and enlightenment that make for a great coming-of-age
story. I thoroughly enjoyed Sib’s
literal and figurative journey to self-discovery and turned the last page feeling
very satisfied. I would definitely
recommend this novel for use in high school classrooms and for personal
enrichment.
Comments