
Winner of multiple literary awards
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WATER MUSIC
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Water Music
The bridge at Sagamore was closed when we got there that summer of 1956. We had to cross the canal at Buzzards Bay over the only other roadway that tethered Cape Cod to the mainland. Thus twelve-year-old Lily Grainger, while safe from ‘communists and the Pope’, finds her family suddenly adrift.
That was the summer the Andrea Doria sank, pilot whales stranded, and Lily’s father built a house he couldn't afford. Target practice on a nearby decommissioned Liberty Ship echoed not only the rancor in her parents' marriage, a rancor stoked by Lily’s competitive uncle, but also Lily’s troubles with her sister, her cousins, and especially with her mother.
In her increasingly desperate efforts to salvage her parents' marriage, Lily discovers betrayals beyond her understanding as well as the small ways in which people try to rescue each other. She draws on her music lessons and her love of Cape Cod—from Sagamore and Monomoy to Nauset Spit and Wellfleet Dunes, seeking safe passage from the limited world of her salt marsh to the larger, open ocean.
Awards & Honors

Winner
Literary Titan Book Award

Finalist
American Writing Awards


Winner
HFC Highly Recommended Award

Winner
New England Book Festival

Finalist
The Wishing Shelf Book Awards

Winner
Firebird Book Award

Finalist
Feathered Quill Book Awards

Notable Book
Praise for Water Music
In her exquisite novel, Water Music, Marcia Peck transports us to Cape Cod, where this wise, funny, and deeply moving novel unfolds over the course of a summer . . . As the summer draws to close, a tragic death occurs, forcing the novel’s deeper question: Can old wounds be resolved, enough to build new dreams? Marcia Peck, a musician herself, brings her understanding of music to the elegant prose that richly describes the rhythms and sounds of the ocean, backdrop to this powerful, tender novel. It is impossible not to love Lily and see ourselves in her struggles as she bravely sheds her innocence to reckon with the adult truths that threaten to tear her family apart.
—Carol Dines, author of This Distance We Call Love and The Take-Over Friend
"The narrative is steeped in music: cello, piano, Stradivarius violins, Glenn Miller on the hi fi, a family chorus of voices, Beethoven, Dvorak, Debussy, ill-fated music teachers, and the song of the natural world - the 'lexicon of birds'. The grieving songs of stranded pilot whales also drift in and, in an extraordinary scene, Lily fights her mother over a stranded whale's dying body. Each chapter is headed by a Beaufort Scale number, each one becoming more 'stormy', as we wait for it to 'blow, through all the family fortunes and misfortunes, allegiances and conflicts, rivalries and rituals . . . When tragedy arrives, Lily comes to learn that 'without dissonance, music was nothing.' This evocative novel is deeply attuned to the beauty and fragility of the natural and human worlds, and is written in sensory, observant, and sensitive prose."
—Andy Brown, author of The Tree Climbing Cure and Grace Notes
And Other Poems