Forty-Nine Bells over Wabash

About this book

Chicago, summer 2026. Sixteen-year-old Dot Wisniewski has just been cut from her high school drumline and is pouring coffee in a lobby under the Wabash elevated tracks when a stranger changes her life in the Sunday paper. Wendell Price, who has played the forty-nine bells of the Coyle Carillon for fifty-five years, names her as his successor. Dot has never touched the instrument, and Wendell did not ask her first. Trained carillon students are outraged. The trustees give her until the Labor Day recital to prove she belongs. Her grandfather Teddy, who never talks about his past, tells her to give it back. As Dot learns to play with blistered fists, nineteen storeys above the Loop, she starts to suspect that the reason she was chosen is buried in another summer, sixty years ago. Why her? And what did it cost someone else?