Echoes of a Silent Song is a dual-timeline novel by Amanda Wen.

Blair Emerson has been the accompanist–or collaborative pianist, as she prefers to be called–for all of Peterson High School’s choirs for several years. But the last five years, no one conductor has stayed more than a year. The lack of continuity has hurt the kids and the music program. And the newest conductor, some hotshot from Boston, is no better. He has said upfront that he only plans to be there for a year.

Callum Knight had been a successful composer and conductor in Boston. But the pandemic brought everything to a screeching halt. And then his fiancee died. His old friend, the retired conductor from Peterson, Illinois, told him about a job opening at the high school–the last thing Callum ever would have considered if he wasn’t desperate. But it would pay the bills for a year and hopefully help his composing muse to come back.

Blair and Callum clash immediately. She has been the only constant in the students’ musical lives for years and feels protective of them. Callum feels they need to be challenged. She feels he’s choosing material that’s too hard and settling them up for failure. She reminds him they are children, not professionals. She thinks he’s arrogant. He thinks she is an ice queen.

They go round and round until they discover an unsigned partial piece of music in an old box in the choir room. They play a part of it on the piano and feel it’s brilliant, but they can’t find any more of the music. As they search, Blair remembers an Iris Wollingford, a student at the school who was said to have composed music but died by suicide before graduation. As Callum and Blair work together to find out more about Iris and her music, they come to understand each other better. But what they find out about Iris stuns them.

Some chapters tell Iris’ story from the late 1960s and early 70s. She was indeed a high school student whose mind was obsessed with music. She was not antisocial, but she didn’t have many friends. Then Victor, a boy in her class, saw a piece of music she was working on and confessed he was a composer, too. They became a couple with big plans to go to college and compose together. But then the draft for the Viet Nam war changed everything.

I’ve not read anything by Amanda Wen before except a Christmas novella, but I saw this as a free audiobook for Audible subscribers and decided to give it a try.

I felt the narrator of the audiobook overdid things in places. I think I would have enjoyed the print version more, but the library didn’t have the book and the Kindle version was more than I wanted to pay. About halfway through the book, either I got used to the narrator by then or she settled down into the story better.

It took me a little bit to get into the story. Some of Blair’s early conversations with her best friend, Joy, seemed downright juvenile. But once we got past that, I became more intrigued. The story seemed to get better as it progressed. We find out what is driving both Blair and Callum, what’s keeping them from opening up to each other, and what really happened to Iris.

I didn’t like the multiple uses of the word “crap.” The faith element seemed a little lacking in the first part of the book, but came out beautifully by the end. Overall, I enjoyed the story, especially the latter half.

The audiobook didn’t contain any notes from the author, but I found one interview she gave about the book here.