Magical composer-in-training Amelia Jones gets kicked out of her dorm room and loses her BF when the "real" Amelia, Mia for short, shows up at school, the Mystwick School of Musicraft, despite being shipwrecked, losing her mother and fighting to survive on an island all first term.
Mia is a whiz at piano, a genuine performing star, with magic fingers and paparazzi. No one can blame her for having a grudge against Amelia – who literally took Mia's spot at the school. Well, maybe Amelia can wonder why the other girl is so nasty toward her all the time and so intent on keeping their mutual friend, Darby, away from her.
Add to that a new Maestro for composing, Miss Motte, who believes composing is all about emotions (the actual nuts and bolts of composing are never touched on in this tale, which is a shame) and has Amelia doing all kinds of non-musical things in "composing" class, instead of actually writing music, and you know Amelia's headed for a musical magical blunder of epic proportions.
When the opportunity to enter a musical composition / performance competition appears, everyone thinks Amelia – having raised the dead, namely her mother's ghost, with her music in the last book – is a shoe-in to win.
Uh, no. Amelia gets writer's block.
Then an invitation to the Midnight Orchestra appears in her room. She goes and it's an odd, eerie experience, involving stepping through a portal to watch musicians she suspects are zombies, because no orchestra plays with that much physical coordination.
The creepy conductor gives her a seed – a literal seed of a memory that packs an emotional wallop – with a caveat. If she uses it, she'll owe him a spell. What kind of spell, he gets to determine – at his leisure / need.
She swears to herself she won't use it, but the *whole school* is waiting for her to drop some bars of a melody they can practice and that'll do amazing magic. When she's still inspiration-less, and gets bullied by Mia for it, she caves.
I won't spoil the rest of the story, just know, it's another awesome musical fantasy!
