What can we say about A Thousand Perfect Notes… it’s a beautiful book! I bought this book on the Kindle, but if you’ve ever seen the paperback copy with the beautiful butterfly that folds out, you’ll know what I’m talking about. It’s by C.G. Drews… AKA Paper Fury! That alone is probably enough to make you want to check out this book.
A Thousand Perfect Notes is about a boy named Beck. He loves his little sister and lives with an abusive mother who tries to compensate for her broken life by forcing him to become the person she wanted to be. This means practicing on the piano for hours a day, neglecting his school work in favor of the piano, and never having a social life. It’s a pretty dreary existence.
Things change when his teacher teams him up with August for a school project. Even though he keeps telling her no, she won’t give up on him. Her intrusion into his life changes his family forever.
What I Liked
There were a lot of things I liked about this book. A Thousand Perfect Notes brings us into an impoverished fictional town somewhere in Australia. Beck and August weren’t the only characters I felt for in this book. Everybody seemed to have a difficult life. But aren’t we all facing something?
The main characters were great. Beck’s mother was a monster, but she had her own personal demons to deal with too. Beck was a sweet, caring cinnamon roll who you just have to with a better life for. August was a sweet, optimistic girl with a dash of crunchy-granola.
Drawbacks?
This is a beautiful story and I think the only thing that separates this book from one of my favorite books that I read this year is a matter of taste. It’s a sweet story with a small but adorable cast. There’s no world-shaking politics, oh-no-we’re-all-gonna-die! moments, or anything like that. The book is light on romance. And that’s okay. We need stories like this one.
Conclusion
If you’re in the mood for a sweet contemporary with adorable characters that deserve better in life and find comfort among each other, A Thousand Perfect Notes is a good choice. I enjoyed this book, although I think I will choose to read C.G. Drews next book, The Boy Who Steals Houses, at a moment when I’m tired of dark fantasy and need something lighter. Because this author is definitely worth reading again.