Phillipa's Fiddler

Phillipa Gray and Johnny McMurray were just teens in love when their respective families decided that they were on the verge of making a terrible mistake and intervened. The boy was not considered good enough for the girl. The girl was distracting the boy from what he should have been focusing.

Since that time, Johnny left home, turning his back on his parents dream and his talent with the violin. Now known as Ian Murray he is the bass guitarist to the famous rock group Bone Cold-Alive.

Ian goes back home when the band is put on an enforced break before some near future touring. Nothing has changed with any of his visits here. His parents continue to be disappointed in his choices.

With a love of music and hard work, Phillipa has become a symphony cellist in London. She is currently back in the area to help take care of her injured grandmother. All of those summer visits past spent at Gran’s and the boy next door have not been forgotten.

They are adults and they find their attraction undimmed. The question is whether the distance of time has already cost them their possibility of happily ever after.

This is the fifth book in the Texoma series which feature the band members Bone Cold-Alive and Ms Sisk continues to impress with her ability to write beautiful moving romance. The main characters’ personalities and histories are revealed bit by bit both from discussions of the past and the viewpoints of family members.

Family dynamics are handled with a fine touch from the humorous quirks to the angst ridden misunderstandings. The hero’s parents will amuse, while the heroine’s mother is as seemingly emotionally selfish of a villain as one could find in a genuinely non-villainous cast of characters.

It is a relaxed pacing to the story and may on occasion have one wishing that things would move along a bit faster. But for the most part, the gentle unrushed feeling works well as Ian and Phillipa both deal with how they viewed each other in the past and how they view each other now.

Examination of identity regarding our hero and descriptions of music played both solo and duet add extra depthto the courtship and romance.

A subplot has the band’s manager Levi Fletcher dealing with the result of a past affair and the tangled situation of the late revelation. His chase to find that lover is entertaining and brings a different element to the book. The breaks from the progress of the main relationship however are unnecessary.

PHILLIPA'S FIDDLER gives us a solid romance in a slice of life that shows intriguing threads to other events. Readers will not want to stop with just one of the stories from this series.

May 2007