Bonnie Marson, Sleeping with Schubert

Liza Durbin was in the women's shoes department at Nordstrom when she was inhabited—literally, not figuratively—by the spirit of Franz Schubert. She sat down at the store's baby grand piano and played a piece skillfully enough to attract an audience. Liza had played piano before, but not well enough to impress her grade school piano teacher. Being inhabited by a dead genius has its benefits—the piano thing—but a lot of negatives go along with it. We follow Liza as she puts her life on hold to deal with her possession. She subjugates her interests to those of her inhabitant, I'd like to say, because she really does give up her life, although the book doesn't really focus too much on her decision to do so, or question it. Meanwhile, she's surrounded by a number of hangers-on, secondary characters who are never really fleshed out and whom we never care about, people who manage her new career as an out-of-nowhere piano prodigy that mostly plays Schubert. We don't really care very much about Liza either, for that matter, or Schubert. The premise of the book is interesting, but it was a bit of a slog, over-long and without much of a payoff.