I’m currently reading this beautifully written and evocative book – a coming-of-age story of a young girl and her family as they summer on Cape Cod.

Thank you for my copy. I look forward to reading more by Marcia Peck!

Here’s the scoop:

Water Music is the story of eleven-year-old budding musician Lily Grainger, who, while encamped with her family on a Cape Cod salt pond during the summer of 1956, longs to capture her mother’s love and attention. In her struggle to help relieve the rancor in her parents’ marriage, Lily draws on her weekly cello lessons as well as her love for a pre-Kennedy Cape Cod infused with beach plums, cormorants, stranded pilot whales, a decommissioned Liberty Ship, and the shipwreck of the Andrea Doria. As Lily discovers the small ways in which people try to rescue each other, she must find the courage to venture beyond the relative safety of her salt pond to taste the larger world of the open ocean.

Praise:

“What happens when a writer plays cello in a professional orchestra for her entire career? Her prose soars. In Water Music, Marcia Peck traces one intricate, intimate melody through the symphonic complexity of a disintegrating family’s summer on Cape Cod. Music and love are interchangeable. Here is a book worthy of reading aloud—and cherishing.”
—Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew, author of Swinging on the Garden Gate

“Peck has written a moving and melodic triumph of imagination and story, a fine harmony of intimacies and passions.”
—Nicole Helget, author of The Summer of Ordinary Ways, The Turtle Catcher, Stillwater 

Marcia Peck’s writing has received a variety of awards, including New Millenium Writings (First prize for “Memento Mori”) and Lake Superior Writers’ Conference (First Prize for “Pride and Humility”). Her articles have appeared in Musical America, Strad Magazine, Strings Magazine, Senza Sordino, and the op-ed pages of the Minneapolis StarTribune.  Marcia’s fiction has appeared in Chautauqua Journal, New Millenium Writings, Gemini Magazine, and Glimmer Train, among others. 

Growing up in New Jersey with parents who were both musicians, Marcia set out to be the best cellist she could be. She spent two years studying in Germany in the Master Class of the renowned Italian cellist, Antonio Janigro. Since then she has spent her musical career with the Minnesota Orchestra, where she met and married the handsome fourth horn player.

Marcia has always been a cat person. But she has learned to love dogs—even the naughty ones, maybe especially the naughty ones.