Bellweather Rhapsody
Ratings8
Average rating3.9
A high school music festival goes awry when a young prodigy disappears from the most infamous room in the Bellweather Hotel, in a whip-smart novel sparkling with dark and giddy humor.
Fifteen years ago, a murder-suicide in room 712 rocked the grand old Bellweather Hotel and the young bridesmaid who witnessed it, Minnie Graves. Now hundreds of high school musicians, including quiet bassoonist Rabbit Hatmaker and his brassy diva twin, Alice, have gathered in its cavernous, crumbling halls for the annual Statewide festival; Minnie has returned to face her demons; and a colossal snowstorm is threatening to trap them all in the hotel. Then Alice's roommate goes missing--from room 712. The search for her entwines an eccentric cast of characters: conductors and caretakers, failures and stars, teenagers on the verge and adults trapped in memories. For everyone has come to the Bellweather with a secret, and everyone is haunted.
*Bellweather Rhapsody* is a genre-blending page-turner, full of knowing nods to pop culture classics from *The Shining* to Agatha Christie to *Glee*. But its pleasures are beautifully deepened by Kate Racculia's skill with her characters, her melancholy, affecting writing about music, and her fearlessness about the loss and darkness that underline the truest humor. This is a wholly winning new novel from a writer to watch.
This description comes from the publisher.
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Holds your interest right from the start, total pageturner, characters you immediately become invested in. Also excellent atmosphere and lead-ins and slow-reveals. I think ultimately sort of a whodunit, but without being hokey or predictable. I also enjoyed the sense of the author having seen The Shining and found it iconic but insipid and knowing she could do better...while nonetheless building on its foundations.
(4.5, rounding up - not tagging as historical fiction because it's set less than twenty years earlier than the publication date, and not tagging as YA because I don't think it is, even though it won a YA award. Anyway.)I LOVED THIS. It's like [b:The Westing Game 902 The Westing Game Ellen Raskin https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1356850909s/902.jpg 869832] crossed with a murder mystery crossed with [b:Dramarama 437590 Dramarama E. Lockhart https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1437512851s/437590.jpg 3085471] (which is super underrated and I love), all set in the late 90s, and you might as well just go ahead and call this my catnip. Half a star deduction because I wasn't as interested in the adult characters and because the villain was just a little too flat as a character, but those are minor nits. I want to give Alice and Rabbit huge hugs and tell them it'll all be okay. And I want to reread this now that I know how it ends and see how everything fits together. It's phenomenal.
This was a fun mystery! I was worried at first about Minnie but I'm glad she got to be a hero. I will also admit that it was tough, as a very mediocre college pianist, to read Viola's passages. She brought back a lot of memories of anguish about music and not being good enough that I'm sort of mostly over! :/
