The Trumpet Lesson: A Novel

Dianne Romain

Sep 2019 · She Writes Press

About this ebook

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.

Ratings and reviews

I received a free electronic copy on August 16, 2019, of this excellent modern novel from Netgalley, Dianne Romain, and SheWrites Press. Thank you all, for sharing your hard work with me. I have read The Trumpet Lesson of my own volition, and this review reflects my honest, personal opinion of this work. This is a novel I can happily recommend to friends and family and is an excellent YA or teen read. It is a novel to savor on a rainy day or as the snow fills in the hills. Dianne Romain brings us a novel set for the most part in the small Mexican town of Guanajuato. It is the tale of young men and women evolving into the well-rounded adults they need to become to thrive in this complicated modern world we now live in. We see their lives from the perspective of Callie Quinn, an in-demand translator to and from English-Spanish-French. Callie is a Chicago girl transplanted to Guanajuato in an effort to isolate herself in hopes she can come to terms with the secrets that have kept her single and in pain since high school. All of these young people live with the aching guilt of secrets they feel they can't share with anyone. Pamela Fischer, the new trumpeter in the local orchestra, is the catalyst that begins bringing to the surface the hidden lives of the protagonists of this fine novel. The arrival of the mothers of Callie and Pamela and Callies' Aunt Ida bring to a head the complexities that keep these young adults enclosed in their secrets and guilt.

About the author

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.