I snagged this MacLachlan book from a BookCrossing bookshelf at my local coffee house, looking forward to an easy read between my more "grown-up" novels. In my opinion, The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt is an unusual book. For young readers unfamiliar with music, understanding and enjoying the short novel may be difficult. Even with 7 years as a musician under my belt, I felt a bit intimidated by the book. With numerous references to famous composers and an extensive musical vocabulary, the charming characters may not make up for the interest-specific plot and writing style. What's more, I often felt unnerved while reading, but am not sure if this is because of Minna's own disconnected personality, or MacLachlan's writing style.
Would I suggest this book to a young musician? Definintely. To my little brother or sister? Probably not. ( )

http://www.lonelymountain.net/books/j... ( )

When I first read this I identified a lot with Minna, as I couldn't find my vibrato and played the 'cello. The language is often poetic and the scene when they play Mozart in the dark is beautiful. ( )

No matter how horrible I feel, this book always makes me feel better. ( )

I picked it up from the children's section at the Williamsburg Library Book Sale on Sunday, thinking that it would be a Christmas present for a friend, but I fell in love with it and don't want to give it up. (Sorry, Rach! You'll get something else wonderful!) Minna's family is really strange: her mother's a writer and never asks her normal questions like "How was your day?" Instead, she gets questions like "What is the quality of beauty?" She longs for a normal family, maybe one like Lucas's, the cute new viola player at the conservatory with a gorgeous vibratto (and no, that's not a euphamism). The usual sequence of growing up and coming to terms with life events happen, but it's the language and wordplay that makes this such a wonderful and lyrical book:

Minna looks out the bus window and thinks about her life. Her one life. She likes artichokes and blue fingernail polish and Mozart played too fast. She loves baseball, and the month of March because no one else much likes March, and every shade of brown she has ever seen. But this is only one life. Someday, she knows, she will have another life. A different one. A better one. McGrew knows this too. McGrew is ten years old. He knows nearly everything. He knows, for instance, that his older sister, Minna Pratt, age eleven, is sitting patiently next to her cello waiting to be a woman.

This was the passage that convinced me to take the book home, and it was well worth it. ( )