Book No. 86 of 2020
I completely forgot that I’d finished this several days ago and hadn’t reviewed it yet. It’s very similar in feel, structure, and composition to the other two adult Eva Ibbotson books I’ve read so far (A Company of Swans and The Secret Countess), but it still feels very fresh and unique.
It was a treat to be transported to Vienna—my memories are blurry, but Ibbotson writes about it with such familiarity and fondness that I felt happily at home in her literary recreation. Likewise, her writing about opera and classical music passes my BS detector. (I have a really, really hard time reading authors who write about classical music without the background or research to back it up—it doesn’t matter how good their writing is otherwise! That’s what music school does to you: it makes a lot of literature unreadable. But I digress.)
Flutes has more than the pure romance of Countess and not nearly as much delicious romantic tension as Swans; it also has an element of ~pining~ that the other two books don’t have. (If you live for the vignette of two characters in love silently acknowledging that they can’t be together, this is the book for you.) It also focuses a bit more on the male protagonist than the other two books do, and the “villain” is devoted to fashion, so expect lush descriptions of gowns (always a perk with period novels). It was also delightful to read about the creation of an avant-grade twelve-tone opera.