Ever since I was a young child, I have had two passions - books and music, specifically fiction and opera. I have pursued the latter interest as my career, as I am currently finishing my doctorate in vocal performance. Even with my overwhelmingly busy schedule that accompanies higher education, and especially a performance degree, I still find myself devouring novels late at night and any other time I can catch a free moment. Equally enjoyable for me is scouring any bookseller's stock that I can find and trying to discover something new or different that will give me a chance to live vicariously through a few exciting characters.

A few years ago I was wandering around a Border's bookstore in Columbus, Ohio. As I was beginning to leave, something interesting grabbed my attention. There were a slew of books, all entitled Gabriella's Voice, sitting with a myriad of other paperbacks. Well, as a singer, any novel with the word "voice" in the title gets my full attention immediately. I picked it up, read the back cover, bought it without hesitation, and was thrilled to find as I started reading it that it was a signed edition.

My initial thought about Gabriella's Voice was that it was a book about me - or someone very much like me. However, this vocalist is not like any other, nor is the book. The novel begins with an opening unlike any other book about a singer - a child discovers her voice because she can scream. She screams enough to disturb the neighbors, alert the authorities, and receive any attention that she could ever want. It is only through vocal training that she learns to make her voice into an instrument of beauty.

Digressing from the wunderkind vocalist, a new character emerges - a fifty-year old man, with a seemingly unlimited budget and a passion for discovering opera talent across the United States. His name is Bill Harness and it is not long before he discovers the voice to rival all other voices in Gabriella Compton. Bill is on a mission to remedy a terrible wrong in the best ways that he knows. The mission, the wrongs that can never be righted, and Bill's own secrets unfold over the course of the novel and his finding of a confidant in Gabriella.

Even as the plot is wonderfully appealing, the true gem of Gabriella's Voice is in the fluid, eloquent, and incredibly knowledgeable writing style of Michael J. Vaughn. It is apparent within moments that he not only loves opera, but more specifically adores singers. With constant odes to Renata Tebaldi, cameo appearances by Licia Albanese, and more quotations of Italian operatic libretti than one is likely to find in the current issue of Opera News, Vaughn is certainly a credible and well-informed music appreciator. That being said, one does not need to be an exceedingly knowledgeable musician to appreciate this novel. Gabriella's Voice works on a higher level than to explain every musical nuance which graces its text (a trap into which many fiction writers tend to fall.) Instead, it includes the subject of music and incorporates it into developing a greater importance of life, love, devotion, and passion. Within moments of starting Gabriella's Voice, one can feel a certain sense of musical propulsion, and much like a brilliant composition, there are cadences, climactic episodes, and stellar recapitulations that bring the entire work together as a whole. It is not because this novel is about an opera singer that it works like a musical grand opus, it is because Vaughn is truly a tremendous writer whose work has gone unnoticed far too long.

I would be hard pressed to find criticism for this novel. Perhaps some of the characters fit a little too easily into their positions, but with such ease of writing style, any other way to characterize them would seem awkward. Some might be dissuaded to think that a soprano would be singing all of the roles that Gabriella sings throughout this novel: Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia, Contessa in Le nozze DI Figaro, Rosalinda in Die Fledermaus, and the title character in Tosca. To anyone with such complaints, I suggest that they visit some smaller venue opera houses to see if Fach is regarded as much as availability and willingness to participate. From my own personal experience, I know that my true Fach has often been ignored when being cast.

Gabriella's Voice is a novel that should not be missed. To any singer who is also a bibliophile, it should be a permanent part of one's library - snuggled comfortably between a Richard Miller pedagogy book and a Norton Anthology of Western Music.