Talented young musician Paige Plant is on a quest to create the perfect album: twelve songs that will save the world, make people cry and make her famous. She has everything in place except a big break.
That break seems to land on her doorstep when former singer-songwriter John Bustin offers to let her live in his recording studio and cut her album. But there is a hitch: John hates her songs. He thinks she has huge potential, but he tells her the songs have to go.
Despite the gap in their ages, life experiences and points of view, the two become partners, creatively and then romantically, and Paige is forced to confront her true feelings, the feelings beneath the songs, in order to write new material. Bustin guides her through a process he calls tapping into the Big Wide Calm. As their relationship deepens, Paige learns about John's past and helps him face secrets from long ago, secrets that could destroy their partnership.
A middle novel about the many forms of love
The Big Wide Calm is the middle book of a planned trilogy about the many forms that love takes. The first, The Color of Home, followed a long-term relationship through its trials. In this second novel Marcello has created a fascinating, complicated heroine whom many readers will recognise in themselves. It is a coming-of-age story about growth and self-awareness, and a grown-up love story about the messier sides of attachment. Above all, it is a novel about the power of human connection and trust.
There is also something of the card table in Paige's story. Every young artist who walks away from a safe job to chase one album is placing a bet on themselves, and Marcello is good on the nerve that takes: the moment you push all your chips into the middle and wait to see whether the world calls. John, who once won big and then lost almost everything, knows the odds better than she does, and their arguments about risk are some of the best scenes in the book.
About the author
Rich Marcello is a contemporary fiction writer, poet and songwriter whose stories often grow out of songs he has written. He grew up in New Jersey and was involved with music from an early age. A love of technology took him into a long career as an executive in the tech sector, but he never stopped writing and making music, and eventually he made writing his full-time work. On creating Paige, he has said that he spent a long time getting her voice right, and once he had it, he wrote the story the way she would have lived it.
RWJ verdict: a warm, thoughtful novel for readers who like their love stories with real adults in them, and for anyone who has ever gambled on a creative dream. Find more in our book reviews.
