A Choir for the Uncounted
In 1955 New Orleans, sixteen-year-old Celeste knows how to hold a choir together: count the beats, catch a missed entrance, keep the younger girls steady when adults are watching. Then she finds a handwritten score hidden in her school loft, its composer's name scraped away. The school is preparing a televised anniversary concert that could secure the choir's future. Its polished program claims a beloved song as school tradition, while church records and living memory point to women whose work was carried, copied, and deliberately erased. As Celeste follows the music back through old papers and neighborhood voices, she learns that the choir director she trusts made one of the compromises that buried the truth. With funding, friendships, and younger singers at risk, Celeste must decide whether safety means preserving the approved story or teaching the choir a fuller one. A Choir for the Uncounted is a tense, music-driven historical novel about loyalty, memory, and the cost of letting a living song tell the truth.
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By the third run-through, Celeste could tell which girl would lose the entrance before the girl herself knew it.
The alto line had been sitting too low. June kept her pencil tucked behind one ear and her eyes on the page, but her left shoulder had begun to lift every time the sopranos rose. Aline, two places over, was watching Mrs. Delacroix instead of counting. The youngest girls were holding their breath too early.
Celeste tapped the edge of the piano with one finger.
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