The Mole And The Violin

About the Book

I loved the story and appreciate you allowing me to pre-read it. This story is awesome and culturally diverse. It brings an acceptance to blindness, and shyness as well as expressing that no-one can prevent anyone else from dreaming. It has a strong family bond across generations and accepts differences. It also recognizes the arts and how important they are as band, chorus, dance, and strings are always at risk of being removed from school curriculum. Jodi Pankowski Principal, Independent Hill and Pace For the Child in Each of Us Edward Gabriele Author, Poet, Teacher Children are fascinating. Stories written about them or for them are equally so. In the pages to follow, you will enter into an amazing world. George Brummell’s work The Mole and the Violin will stoke your imagination and fill you with wonder. The tale of Mikey the mole and his friendship with Emma the violinist is more than a story. It is an experience and a journey. But an experience of what? A journey where? These questions require a bit of reflection. We adults treasure our experiences with children and the stories for and about them. Both are precious. We hear our children laugh, and it moves us to laugh with equal energy. We hear them cry or we hear horrific tragedies such as the one that befell the children at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and we are overwhelmed with sadness. We walk into our children’s bedrooms and see them sleeping, and we watch with a tenderness that cannot be captured in simple words. When we encounter little ones in life, we treasure in them all that we have been and wish still to be. In them, we see our own dreams, hopes, fears, loves, joys, our very selves. In The Mole and the Violin, we have an exquisite story where a seemingly insignificant animal from the dark corridors of the earth burrows his way daringly up to the surface. He risks to experience something different. When Mikey unearths himself, he hears something so beautiful that he cannot help but follow its path—even though it means risking a possible encounter with real danger. He risks and runs headlong into a creature making the most beautiful sounds he has ever heard. Suddenly he knows the experience of desire. He wants to be caught up in the beauty of what he hears, and this leads him to befriend the human girl, Emma. She cannot believe he talks. He cannot believe she cares. His search and her amazement bring them together as friends; and suddenly they come to teach each other things utterly new and wondrous. Like all other children’s stories, The Mole and the Violin is just as much for adults. The pages you are about to turn are more than just a story. They are the doorway into an experience—an experience of who we are and all we wish to be as humans, as family members, as friends, as citizens of this wonderful planet, as the dreaming children we never cease to be. George Brummell has given us a gift far greater than just a story. Like all children’s literature, he has given us a story that we do not just read to ourselves or to our children. He has given us a living pathway on which we journey with our children toward that moment we all crave when our dreams might become waking realities. As you burrow through the following pages, listen carefully. You too just might hear the sound of something musically wonderful. But be careful. It just might make you want to burrow open your heart to a stranger, sing to a melody our world too often does not hear, and learn to love enough to make a new music that sets all the world a’dancing.

About the Author

About the Author George Brummell is the author of his memoir Shades of Darkness. He is retired from the US Army, a war veteran blinded as result of a mine explosion in Vietnam. He is also a retired National Field Services director for the Blinded Veterans Association and a graduate of the University of Akron with a degree in social work. Despite his injuries, he is very active—riding his tandem, writing, public speaking, and traveling the world with his wife, Maria. He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, and enjoys visiting area schools, motivating children about his journey. While conducting a writing workshop at an area elementary school, he noticed that children responded positively to his unique circumstances, which motivated him to write a book for young readers. Since blindness is a subject he is very familiar with, he chose a mole as the protagonist. George felt Mikey the mole was much like him—independent curious and didn’t let sightlessness get in his way. He got the idea of the instrument from his violin-playing granddaughter, Emma. She inspired him at a young age with her hard work, discipline, and persistence to master the instrument. George thinks his positive, upbeat attitude and interesting stories have motivated children in classrooms to better their writing and reading skills. Now he wants to motivate through The Mole and the Violin, a book that introduces young readers to a nearly forgotten creature that survives in an dark underground environment and to the beauty of the violin.