Rhapsody

Beautiful Music and Star Crossed Lovers This book is so much more than I expected. Some of it requires a person well versed in music to understand. Most of it just needs someone who is familiar with G.Gershwin and the music of the era. So much of the story is about the lives of people who don't fit into the times they're born into. This is about the people more than anything. There is WWI and its fallout in Europe. There is prohibition and speakeasy drinking. There is the moral decadence of the twenties. The nights filled with fine dining and drinking, Broadway plays, and Vaudeville. There is the Great Depression and all that it brought to main street. The Hollywood scene with their open moral decadence and the spectacular movie industry. There is the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany, but not WWII. And looping through it all is a woman with great musical talent who is trying to be the wife and mother she is expected to be while her inner self just wants to create music. This is a deep novel on many planes. It is focused on Kay Swift and those in her spotlight. The author does a fine job of taking the known details of her life and creating likely side events that are unknown to us. I received this ARC book for free from Net Galley and this is my honest review.

I received a free electronic ARC of this historical novel from Netgalley, Mitchell James Kaplan, and Gallery Books. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me. I have read 'Rhapsody' of my own volition and this review reflects my honest opinion of this work. Mitchell James Kaplan doesn't disappoint - he is an author I can depend on to transport me to another world. I am pleased to recommend him to friends and family. We go straight to NYC in the mid-1920s. We see a world peopled with frantically gay people, driven by Jazz and 'modern' art and building rising over 60 stories high. Motor cars and washing machines, radios and telephones and airplanes and moving pictures. As the years unfold, Europe is beginning to see fears in the eyes of their politicians and signs of coming disruption, and the confidence that came with the end of the Great War is beginning to fade, to be overshadowed by political rumblings in Spain and Germany, faltering stock markets worldwide, and international banks on the brink of failure. How long can we hide in the Jazz Age? Quite a while, it seems. Katharine “Kay” Swift is the wife of a wealthy banker, mother of three, and a pianist and composer of distinction. Katherine is restless, feeling trapped in domesticity and her 'open' marriage and sure she is missing a natural mother gene. She has trained her whole life to be a concert pianist. That is her measure of success - her heart pouring out of piano keys. She needs recognition for her work. And then she meets George Gershwin. A man compelled to make music, a man whose talent and soul belong to the world. A man she can make music with. Despite all they have in common, can that be enough? 1 like