JOSEPH P. DESARIO

It’s Jacy’s first day at Prescott Conservatory, an elite but notoriously strange music school located in the north woods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Atop the portico of the concert hall is an ancient bronze of Orpheus, the Greek god whose music charmed wild beasts and caused trees to uproot themselves and follow after him. But Orpheus is empty-handed. He is without his lyre, his instrument of power. 

 

As Jacy walks the promenade that circles a nature preserve called the Wilds, she’s attacked by a mountain lion, a vicious predator whose closest habitat is hundreds of miles away. The cat is poised for the kill when it looks up at the statue. It screams, leaps off and disappears into the Wilds, setting off a series of events that will echo a tragedy that befell the school’s founder over a century before.

 

Escaping from certain death, Jacy enters into a new life at Prescott. She chases her dreams. She finds the lyre of Orpheus and discovers the true power of music through its mysterious liberating force—the echo—that releases the talent and the passion she carries inside. 

 

Jacy is a natural talent. Her gift comes easily and unbidden, although she fears she has plateaued just short of true virtuosity. Raised by her mother, a frustrated artist who moved through borders and marriages with equal ease, Jacy has lived a vagabond life, friendless and fatherless. She comes of age at Prescott as she struggles to cross the final treacherous inch on her journey to greatness. 

 

As a young girl Jacy caught the eye of legendary violin master Wyatt Groth who predicted that one day she would attend Prescott. When he hears her first performance at the conservatory, he knows she’s the one he’s been waiting for. His embrace of Jacy as his new protégé inflames a bitter rivalry with Ellie Mattheson, a third-year student whose beauty and talent had gone without challenge until Jacy’s arrival. Ellie also battles Jacy for the attentions of Lamar Trent, a street-smart guitarist from the South Side of Chicago. 

 

The school is known for its world-acclaimed collection of primitive, ancient and antique instruments, which Mack Nieminen, the curator, mysteriously keeps locked away in an old coal bunker deep underground. Mack, a lettered archeologist of mixed Finnish and Ojibwe ancestry, has his own reasons—quite different from Groth’s—for wanting Jacy to come into her destiny. Jacy, who never has had a father in her life, seeks guidance from both men. 

 

Ultimately, Jacy confronts the dark side of the echo when it releases forces caged within all instruments that have been crafted from the once living things of the animal and plant kingdoms. She has to choose between the realization of her full musical potential and love. 

 

She finds find that gods can be demons and paradise can be hell.