Barbara Kingsolver’s new book is a canny feat of art imitating art. Partita is about a pianist, Livia, looking back at her life and trying to understand what art means to her.

It’s structured the same way the composition from which it takes its name is. A partita consists of a series of dance movements, typically written for a solo instrument, that vary in pace and mood. All these parts must come together to form the whole. In much the same way, Livia and the reader must bring these movements together to achieve a sense of completeness and understanding.

Each chapter is named for the various elements common in musical compositions and they follow their moods and pace. For instance, the novel’s sarabande chapter is calm, reflective, or emotionally intense like it would be in a piece of music. In this way, the book doesn’t have a linear structure as various chapters serve as refrains (a rondo) or go back to the beginning (Da Capo).

The story alternates between formative events from Livia’s adolescence and early adulthood as well as the present when Livia is in her mid-40s. As the pieces come together, we see Livia as a whole. She was a prodigious young piano talent working hard to keep up her prestigious scholarship. She then gets pulled into the exciting world of an older trade unionist and starts questioning everything. In the present, she has become a middle-aged woman who is an inspirational local music teacher in Tennessee.

Our reviewer found Partita to be a virtuosic work that in its........

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