The Five Browns: Life Between the Keys

With sold-out concerts and screaming fans, The 5 Browns are redefining what it means to be classical musicians. Twenty-something siblings who grew up in a small town in Utah, the piano virtuosos are sweeping the nation—and the classical charts. In LIFE BETWEEN THE KEYS, these charming, warm, and funny prodigies reveal their most intimate musings, impressions, and memories along their journey from obscurity to stardom.

The 5 Browns’ insights found in this book will relate to readers of all ages through a collection of true short stories and vignettes, written by each one of the siblings in his or her own words. Readers can listen to the accompanying unedited live performance CD, matching The 5 Browns’ individual styles of playing with their different personalities.

Readers will experience the journey with each of the pianists as they take their places at their respective pianos, lock eyes, exchange a silent signal, and in a mere instant transform themselves from regular kids into musical dynamos, flawless in precision and steeped in passion. They have shattered all the preconceptions of classical music as being inscrutable or intimidating. As the New York Post proclaimed, "One family, five pianos, and fifty fingers add up to the biggest classical music sensation in years."

Review: Dave at Night by Gail Carson Levine

This is the second Gail Carson Levine I’ve read (the first was Ella Enchanted which is lovely and great and way better than that dumb movie), and let me just say that she doesn’t let down on the endings. They’re never complex, they’re never hard to grasp, but they’re simple and perfect and plausible.

Her portrait of 1920s New York was about as accurate as I could require, and filled with the sepia settings of theJewish poor and the glitter of the rich and black. Having read The King of Mulberry Street in the past month, too, I found familiarity, even though the stories are entirely different. Neither of the books really seemed to move, even though they were both well-written and technically good; maybe that’s what people expect when they pick up an historical. I, for one, don’t.

I loved the cameos by Langston Hughes and W. E. B. DuBois, and the glimpses into black Harlem were great. I’ll be searching out a new “type” of book now, one that gives me more insight into that time and place.