Andrea Avery started piano lessons while still a little girl. Wonderful things happened right away. Her fingers raced over the keys. Her brain understood the tricks to be performed. Her heart fell hard for Mozart and then Schubert.

The trouble came on all the nights, all the mornings, when Avery woke up stiff, swollen, overheated.

Her mother, a nurse, took copious notes of every symptom, helping the doctors arrive at their diagnosis: rheumatoid arthritis.

And what does that do to a young pianist’s dreams?

In her memoir, Sonata, Avery recalls her grade-school life of laying back in pain on the bad days, patiently performing exercises during her physical therapy appointments and then, on the good days, bouncing back like any bike-riding, fence-climbing kid. It was just a bad spell.

If that’s all it was, there wouldn’t be a book, would there?

But Avery eventually found herself in a bent and scarred body. And what about playing the piano? They say arthritis is bad for the piano, but the piano is good for arthritis. Did she have to give up her dreams?

To read Avery is to feel a burden that can’t be escaped, can’t be thrown off. And yet, to be in her literary company is pure delight. This gal can write.

Sonata is available on Kindle, for all you book-starved isolatees.