At 12, Martin Pittman is a gifted natural musician, but his angry father wants his son to play baseball and considers Martin a disappointing sissy britches. They live in Paradise Trailer Park in South Carolina, where Martin shares his love of music with Wylen, a lonely misfit who gives Martin a violin. Martin also gets support from his chain-smoking grandmother and one of his classmates, who help him find the strength to stand up to his dad and break away. There is a dramatic resolution when Dad smashes the violin and Martin holds firm; but the power of this novel is in the hardscrabble portrait of the people and the place, the harshness and sorrow and affection. There is no reverence about the music, either. Martin plays and sings and listens to ragtime, church music, country and western, Broadway musicals, jazz, and Beethoven. He loses his violin, but his friend gets him a saxophone, and he learns to play it, walking and blowing, squeaking, and squawking in the dirt and gravel of the trailer park. (Reviewed April 15, 1997)

In order to pursue his dream, Martin, who has a gift for music, must find the courage to defy his verbally abusive father, who finds the unathletic boy a constant disappointment. Despite the stock characterization of Martin's unemployed, belligerent father, the novel contains a likable cast of unusual characters (including Martin's quick-tongued grandmother), all of whom encourage Martin to stand up for himself.

For every child who was ever forced to play sports, a kindred spirit: Martin, 12, the funny, angst-ridden, musically talented hero of O'Connor's first novel. ""Paradise"" is the name of the South Carolina trailer park where Martin lives with his long-suffering mother, sadistic father, and a peanut gallery of eccentric characters: ultra-shy Wylene, a handkerchief-factory worker who is Martin's closest friend and fellow music-lover; the scrawny, chain-smoking Hazeline, who wants her beloved grandson to stand up to his selfcentered father, Ed, who believes that music is for sissies. Ed bullies the boy for daydreaming and pressures him to play on the Little League team, but he can't smother Martin's interest in a violin that he spies in a secondhand store. Wylene's purchase of the violin enables Martin to demonstrate his real talent and to experience genuine happiness; its destruction, in Ed's hands, induces Martin to take his first steps toward his destiny. Readers will relish this trip down South, and they couldn't ask for a better guide than O'Connor, who captures a young boy's heart and holds it out as a gift.

Quirky characters populate this promising, minor-key first novel set in a South Carolina trailer park ironically dubbed Paradise. Twelve-year-old Martin has a rare talent for music, but his father thinks it's a waste of time. Nothing Martin ever has or does is good enough, not his baseball swing, friends or pastimes. """"All my life I ain't never had nothing but disappointments, and you're just icing on the cake,"""" his father berates him. When Martin sees a violin in a pawnshop, he dreams of getting it. His unlikely allies are his grandmother Hazeline, his agoraphobic and overweight neighbor, Wylene, and the tall new girl in school, Sybil. The author, who grew up in South Carolina, has an instinctive feel for the local speech and its rhythms. Though the father's emotional cruelty may be difficult reading for some, this book ultimately has a hopeful outlook--resilient people rise against the wind, and self-worth is determined chiefly from within. Ages 10-13. (Apr.)