Partita By Barbara Kingsolver review – a quieter follow-up to Demon Copperhead

The sex writing threatens to throw the novel off-kilter, but there are rich rewards in this tale of music and middle-aged compromisesWhat is the role of art in an artist’s life? Should you commit everything to honing your talent in the hope of becoming a great master? Or should you use your artistic gift to enrich your life and that of your community? In Partita, acclaimed American novelist Barbara Kingsolver grapples with these questions seriously and passionately through the story of a piano prodigy turned music teacher.The novel opens in the present, where Livia is a school music teacher in the same part of rural Tennessee where she grew up, married to a farmer who once worked on her father’s farm. Contented middle age has been disturbed by a phone call from Sigurd, a man she had an all-consuming, destructive love affair with at college. This pulls her back into her past: both the period of her brother’s suicide when she was 11, and the years when she escap