I don't always say that a book is a must-read, but when I do, I really mean it. EVERYONE MUST READ THIS BOOK.

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the amazing book trailer ( )

I won a Kindle copy of this memoir from a Goodreads giveaway and – wow – what a real unexpected gem. “Sounds Like Titanic” is the memoir of a classically trained violinist who goes on tour with an unnamed composer. She pretends to play against a backing soundtrack for sold-out concert venues, at craft fairs and in malls across middle America.

It is against this background that Hindman explores her life growing up in rural Appalachia, what it means to be your authentic self (particularly as a woman), dealing with anxiety and traveling through middle America post-9/11. Hindman also takes a lot of risks in the book by tackling so many different topics and using second person narration for different chapters. At first, it doesn’t feel like this would work well together but for me, it made all the sense in the world. She shares her observations with a lot of humor and accuracy. Despite her unique and bizarre circumstances, I could see a lot of my own feelings and experiences reflected in hers.

For example, here’s a passage where Hindman explains the perception of potential for young girls (the sky’s the limit!) versus the reality of growing up in a body that will be scrutinized for years to come:

Born into the first generation of girls whose political and civic equality was already assumed, you are told from the earliest age that you can become an astronaut, a doctor, the president of the United States (if you work hard enough). The potential for your life supposedly has no bounds. But by your twelfth birthday, you have a sinking feeling. You can’t do life in this body. Not this body, the one that is appearing slowly, then suddenly before you in the mirror. This body is a stranger; you don’t know it, you don’t like it. It’s certainly not the body you would have ordered from a catalog.

I ended up highlighting 32 more passages like these. This was one of my favorite books of the month! ( )

Memoir about an aspiring violinist who joins a professional ensemble with a known (but unnamed) conductor and travels around the US on a tour. The thing is the musicians just play to dead mics while a sound track (sounding like Titanic) puts out the music. But it's more than that. It's a memoir of finding a sense of self that is funny (sometimes biting), personal, empathetic and amazingly true. And her prose is great. She now teaches creativ writing which is fitting. ( )

Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman may have been a mediocre violinist, but she’s a heck of a writer. In Sounds Like Titanic, she creates a multi-leveled metaphor in which a movie – an artificial contrivance largely about class differences – reflects a contemporary American life in which audiences clamor to listen to “concerts” in which the musicians stand before dead mikes, pretending to play saccharine but soothing musical pap.

The metaphor is fresh and effective and telling, echoing the experience of the haves and have-nots of her youth – the blue-collar Appalachian kids who were siphoned off into the chicken processing plants or Uncle Sam’s Army, versus the super-rich kids she rubbed elbows with at Columbia; then loops around to make the point that audiences clamored to “hear” fake concerts of music purposely designed to sound like the Titanic sound track – fake “music” fake-played by real musicians, and wraps it up with a comparison to the faking-it behavior young women learn in order to survive in a world that tells them they are not pretty enough, not thin enough, not worthy enough in and of themselves to be accepted as something of value. That difference between value and popularity, between real and fake, permeates the world she examines.

Not everyone is going to be comfortable with the structure, which slides around loosely in time, jumping back and forth in Hindman’s life, or with her on-again, off-again use of the second person narrative. And some will get hung up on the choices she makes – starting with choosing a totally unsuitable college based purely on the desire to attend the same institution as her high-school boyfriend.

The relationship, unsurprisingly, doesn’t last, and Hindman rapidly finds herself in over her head – musically, as she discovers that despite her love for the violin, she will never have what it takes to be a professional musician; financially, as she struggles to make tuition and living expense in a milieu where most of her classmates are one-percenters; and scholastically as she piles on classes in an attempt to get her degree in three years while at the same time working insane hours to make the money to get the degree to get the job to make the money – an endless merry-go-round that ultimately lands her in the fake-music business.

And all this is happening against the background of 90s feminism and the Iraq war, and within a stratified culture, fake-playing homogenized music that sounds “just like a movie about an entire society – rich on the top deck, poor on the bottom – headed for disaster.”

There’s a whole lot going on in this deceptively slim volume, and while one can be appalled at some of Hindman’s choices, one can also relish her journey to self-realization. ( )

When reading Sounds Like Titanic there are two things you must quickly accept. First, you will never learn the identity of "The Composer" who led the author in her "Milli Violini" tours around the country where audiences heard a CD rather than the musicians themselves. Second, the memoir is written largely in second person. The reasons for these decisions are set out clearly early on, but I still had a struggle with this book that nagged me throughout. Despite being told that these were the decisions, carefully made, by the author, I felt like they were distancing mechanisms. I only ever felt in conversation with this book to put my finger on why scenes that I should be lapping up weren't hitting the mark for me. Nevertheless, my searching to connect with the book kept me engaged throughout. BUT the minute I put it down I googled who The Composer might be, and I'm not sure if that was an intended consequence or not, if I'm supposed to see to the symbolism when I want specifics. ( )