Goodbye, Tchaikovsky

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Sample

A twelve-year-old violin virtuoso, David Rothman is an overnight success. He performs Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in New York’s Symphony Hall and gets rave reviews that attract the attention of the Queen of England. His future as a musician lies brilliantly before him. Then one morning, David wakes up to discover that he has sudden and irreparable hearing loss, plunging him into a silent world and forcing him to adapt to a new culture and language in order to survive. Written from David’s perspective, the novel shows how an adolescent boy sets about coping with what he perceives as a devastating new condition. It takes time. How will he communicate with his friends? What can he do about school? How does he deal with unexpected and possibly dangerous situations? What will his future be like?

Author Michael Thal grew up in the hearing world; as a child, he played the violin and went to concerts, movies, and Broadway shows. But as an adult, one day he woke up to deafness, the result of a virus. The virus attacked again six years later, causing him to lose his hearing entirely in his right ear and leaving him with 65% hearing loss in his left. He says:

“I can understand people one on one but not in groups. At the age of forty-four, severe hearing loss took me away from my job as a sixth-grade teacher. From that experience, I was inspired to write this story. If people have a willingness to learn and an open mind to explore all possibilities, they can find a way to succeed.”