Playing By Heart

Coming In October 2022

Returning to the characters readers grew to love in LUMINA, author Mary Flinn continues their parallel stories in Playing by Heart. The current-day Wilmington characters Anne Borden Montgomery and Mr. May are back to attic diving during the early stay-at-home days of the COVID-19 pandemic. After discovering more of AB’s mother Sylvie’s diaries, the two are eager to share these new treasures with their younger neighbors, Nate and Elle, on the front porch where they can sit outside, read to each other, and maintain social distancing. The reading is a nice break for Nate, who is struggling to work effectively from home, and Elle, determined to keep her bakery from falling victim to COVID.

Paired with their story is Sylvie Meeks’ journey to the Conservatory of Music at Oberlin College in 1928. As a first-year performance student, Sylvie realizes she is a fish out of water with her ungainly Southern accent and unassuming ways. Pining for the family and unfinished business she’s left behind, Sylvie is looking for just one friend. She finds four other misfits: Dot an overconfident soprano from Cincinnati; Bart, a fellow pianist from Chicago, vying for faculty favor; Hersch, a Jewish violinist from New York City; and Mina, a gifted singer and descendant of slaves. Sylvie narrates her life through soul-searching diary entries while trying to fit in and help her friends work through their own identity searches.

Who among Sylvie’s friends will make the cut at Oberlin and go on to become professional musicians? Will Sylvie’s search for truth destroy or strengthen her relationships? And what can Elle and her friends learn from Sylvie and her time as they endure their own efforts to cope with social distancing and planning a wedding amid a pandemic?

Review

New Novel Counterpoises Stories of Romance and Survival in 1920s and 2020s

Mary Flinn’s new novel Playing by Heart is a standalone work that is also a sequel to her previous novel LUMINA. It juxtaposes modern-day characters living through the pandemic in Wilmington, North Carolina, with a story set in the late 1920s.

In modern-day Wilmington, Anne Borden (AB) Montgomery, a just-turned eighty independent woman, decides to search her attic for more of her mother Sylvie Meeks’ diaries as reading material to entertain her and her friends in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. AB has been looking after her longtime friend, Bernie May, also eighty, who has been dealing with a personal illness. Their neighbors, Elle and Nate, are a young couple in their thirties planning to get married until the pandemic disrupts their lives. The four of them come together on AB’s porch, properly social distanced, or via Zoom, to read Sylvie’s diaries and continue the story of her romance and life in Wilmington and now at Oberlin College in Ohio that they had previously begun reading.

Flinn does a superb job of keeping the suspense going by switching back and forth between the two time periods and showing how the modern characters react to Sylvie and her friends’ predicaments. While Elle, Nate, Bernie, and AB cope with wearing masks and disinfecting groceries, Sylvie lives in the aftermath of the 1926 flu epidemic that led to the early deaths of her mother and two younger siblings. When Elle and Nate’s neighbor Patsy contracts the coronavirus, they take in her mixed race, teenage grandson, Aubrey, and they all watch with outrage as they see George Floyd die on TV due to police brutality. Meanwhile, Sylvie arrives at Oberlin College where she befriends black and Jewish students and finds that her Southern accent makes her an outsider. The issues Sylvie faces are as relevant today as they were then, as the modern characters realize.

At the center of each story is also romance. Sylvie meets a young man at Oberlin whom she soon becomes interested in, but she isn’t sure to what degree he returns her feelings. He seems to flirt with her, then pull away. Her roommate, Dot, has the same issues with her young man. Finally, secrets are revealed that put things in perspective for Sylvie. Meanwhile, a young man back home is also interested in her. As if figuring out her own love story were not enough, Sylvie is also caught up in trying to understand her brother’s romance with her friend Catherine. LUMINA had largely been about Catherine’s own tragic story, and now in Playing by Heart, she’s trying to put her life back together. Her story will inform some of Sylvie’s personal decisions.

Meanwhile, Elle and Nate debate how they will pull off their wedding or if they can even have one due to the pandemic restrictions. Elle owns a bakery and is dismayed as one bride after another cancels her wedding and consequently her cake order. Even if her own wedding were held, would anyone be able to attend?

The reader is in for a real time-travel adventure in these pages as they experience the discrimination of the 1920s, the music of the Jazz age, train rides, and speakeasies, all while recalling the discomfort of lockdowns from the pandemic we’ve all lived through. Flinn does a beautiful job of tying together the two stories and bringing both to a satisfying conclusion that will leave the reader wanting more. Fortunately, Flinn has a hard time letting go of her characters, so Sylvie, Elle, AB, and all the others may yet appear in another novel.

For more information about Mary Flinn and Playing by Heart, visit www.TheOneNovel.com.

— Tyler R. Tichelaar, PhD and award-winning author of When Teddy Came to Town