So Much Potential, So Much Letdown

I feel really bad about DNFing this book, but when you start finding anything and everything to avoid reading a book, it’s a sign.

I REALLY wanted to like it based off the book jacket description. It had everything I should love. A historically based plot, a young protagonist, and a story completely about a musician and the playing of music.   And it had all those things….they were just sort of not actually the real plot. I should have DNFed it at the 40% mark, but in my blind determination, I thought it would get better if I just kept reading.

It didn’t.

Set in the 1850s – 1870s, Blind Tom Wiggins is a teenage prodigy pianist. But he’s also a slave, and not right in the head. Based on the description of his “not rightness” he most likely has severe Autism, but since this is the 1800s, he’s a deranged black kid who no one knows what to do with.

To keep him occupied while his mother is working during the day, the slave mistress lets the boy sit in the parlor during her piano lessons and they find out that Tom can mimic anything he hears on the piano. When it’s clear that Tom isn’t just luckily bashing away at keys that he can’t see, the owners waste no time in turning him into a dazzling entertainment for all their rich, white friends.

Through a set of murky circumstances Tom ends up being sold to a stage manager/talent scout (maybe? The guy’s actual title is never fully clear) who tours Tom nationally. Later on, Tom is bought back by the original family and goes on to world wide acclaim when the master’s son takes over as Tom’s manager.

The story is told out of order and by many different narrators, and in the beginning, I really liked trying to figure out how Allen was going to put all of these disparate voices together to form Tom’s story. 77% of the way through the book, I was STILL trying to figure out where this book was going.

Aside from Tom’s story, there’s also a plot line of a minister and his friend, who it seemed also wanted a piece of the Blind-Tom pie, a northern woman who marries the Southerner’s son and ends up being Tom’s reluctant care-taker after her husband’s sudden disappearance, and Tom’s mother, who moves to New York after the end of the Civil war and tries to locate her son.

This book has potential, it really does. Allen’s research is dead-on for this time period and whenever he’s dealing with Tom and his music, the book is brilliant and engaging. Watching his characters navigating through Reconstruction and self-identity is beautiful, but his prose is incredibly dense and peppered with parenthesized clarifications that do nothing more than distract.

While the plot does seem to come back to Tom in some form or fashion, the meandering and interminable side roads this story takes frustrated me to no end and didn’t make the amazing parts worth it to me.