Review: Singing Lessons for the Stylish Canary, by Laura Stanfill
Lanternfish, 2022. 334 pp. $19

The nineteenth-century French village of Mireville has a peculiar destiny and makeup. Not only does the sun never shine, which makes growing anything edible a pointless chore; the key industry, so to speak, is fabricating elaborate music boxes called serinettes. These gadgets perfectly imitate pitches that birds sing, except the music is popular songs.

Why would anyone want that, you ask? To teach canaries to sing music recognizable to human ears—of course!—and to hold competitions. Or such is the case in America, the market for the serinettes produced in the Blanchard family workshop.

Though Mireville has lace makers, grocers, and even luthiers, the Blanchards rank among the best families there. This status is duly impressed on every firstborn Blanchard male, who’ll one day run the business. Accordingly, the village wives whose husbands make lace or violins pay social calls on Mme Blanchard—of whatever generation you care to name—hoping to prepare the groundwork for a match between the Blanchard scion and their daughters.

This social-climbing pipe dream has even less chance of fruition once Georges Blanchard, as an infant, somehow chases the rain away and earns the sobriquet of Sun-Bringer. His mother, Cérine, doubts he did anything of the kind, but her husband insists, so that’s that.

Her child’s difficult infancy confirms for Cérine what she already knew—women do the work, and men make the rules:

As was expected of all music-makers’ wives. Cérine raised Georges to stifle skinned-knee yelps and to lift his chair away from the table, lest the scuffs trigger his father’s temper. Silence was sacred—not for women or children to break. But sometimes she hummed under her breath, or dropped a knife on the stone hearth, or smashed a plate just so she could pick the pieces up and throw them down again, allowing herself a lingering measure of joy at each small thud and crack.

The legacy of Sun-Bringer sticks to Georges with untold consequences; his son, Henri, feels keenly the need to do something extraordinary, except he can’t. Not at first, anyway.

What he can do, though, is listen and show great empathy, sometimes to an excessive degree. Those qualities will figure in his attempt at heroics, but their everyday impact is equally remarkable. Henri’s closest, only friend is Aimée Maullian, a lacemaker’s daughter. He takes heat for choosing a friend of the opposite gender, but by the time he’s twelve, the young female population of Mireville is eating out of his hand—which he recognizes only dimly, so intent is he on having friends.

I’d sooner believe Henri’s father ordained the sunshine that now roasts Mireville. But Singing Lessons is a gently magical tale, and greater truths sometimes lie beyond literal fact. If men believe they can and should teach canaries to sing, they can’t be expected to listen to their wives and daughters. In theory, that leaves a tremendous competitive edge to any boy who’s got open ears and a good heart.

But that boy will also suffer guilt and terrible loneliness, because his father, expecting great accomplishments like changing the weather, and will ignore him if they don’t occur. Henri also knows he has a rival for his father’s favor, acknowledged but seldom spoken of. It follows, then, that Henri will try to earn Georges’s love by working a miracle. And when that attempt falls flat, the boy, now seventeen, must leave Mireville.

Singing Lessons is a pleasant, heartwarming novel, so I almost feel churlish for pointing out its weaknesses. Henri’s the crux of the story, but he doesn’t begin the book; his father does. That’s understandable, in that the father’s legacy shapes the narrative. Besides, Stanfill has to explain what a serinette is, how it works, and its social place in Mireville.

Even so, that setup takes a while to get rolling. And when Henri has to leave town, I expect him to suffer serious reversals before the end, yet he doesn’t. He faces obstacles, but mostly they grant him experience that has a salutary effect. I’m glad for him, but it also seems a bit neat, as does the final resolution. Whether that’s pleasing or less satisfying depends on your taste.

I wonder whether Stanfill might have begun with Henri’s story, interposing his father’s as needed, and used the space saved to draw out the boy’s wanderings. But she apparently spent fifteen years writing the book, so no doubt she tried that option and decided against it.

Singing Lessons for the Stylish Canary offers a sweet story about fathers and sons, with wry observations about male pride. Read the novel for either reason, and you’ll be rewarded.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.