The Trumpet Lesson: A Novel

Dianne Romain

sept 2019 · She Writes Press

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Fascinated by a young woman’s performance of “The Lost Child” in Guanajuato’s central plaza, painfully shy expatriate Callie Quinn asks the woman for a trumpet lesson — and ends up confronting her longing to know her own lost child.

When Callie became pregnant in 1960s rural Missouri over thirty years ago, her outraged father, with her mother’s acquiescence, insisted that no one know—and Callie complied. She went away, and she gave up her baby. She did it to protect the baby’s father—a black teen—from the era’s racist violence.

When Pamela, the trumpeter whose music flows from her heart, enters Callie’s life, Callie begins to dream of opening her own heart. But instead she remains silent, hiding her longing and risking giving up everyone she dares to love in order to safeguard her secret. Callie tells herself she does so to protect her daughter, but ultimately, in order to speak, she must confront the deepest reasons for her silence—the ones she’s been concealing even from herself.

Acerca del autor

Dianne Romain lives with novelist Sterling Bennett in Guanajuato, a colonial city in the central Mexican highlands. She grew up and went to college in Missouri before moving to Berkeley for graduate school. After completing her PhD in philosophy, she stayed in California, where she taught feminist ethics and philosophy of emotion at Sonoma State University and published Thinking Things Through, a critical thinking textbook. After moving to Mexico, she took up the trumpet; she has since played jazz and classical duets in the plazas of Guanajuato. With honorary grandchildren in Canada, the US, and Spain, Romain often finds herself writing on the go. In Guanajuato, she enjoys teaching beginning Lindy Hop, taming the four scaredy-cats that scrambled over her garden wall, and walking hillside goat trails.