A complex and vivid portrait of Anna Maria della Pietà ... Constable fills in the gaps, giving this remarkable figure the kind of nuanced origin story that has rarely been afforded by history to female artists ... Constable brings the sensory experience of Anna Maria’s sound to life through visuals.
Constable delivers on that promise beautifully with a multidimensional character who is nonetheless still of her era ... The ambitious undertaking to resurrect Anna with nuance and authenticity has been very successfully achieved with this impressive debut.
One of this novel’s great pleasures is how snugly Constable sits in the ear of a musical prodigy ... This novel about music is fundamentally about silence; the myriad ways in which female authorship has been erased. Constable is strongest in this darker territory, veering away from the cuter depictions of orphan life in Venice ... Constable’s novel never feels heavy on its historic details; instead, they’re weaved into a captivating narrative that’s as tightly tuned as a thriller.
Compassionate ... Constable is good on atmosphere. Her admirable research and careful accretion of detail as she describes life in Venice, inside and outside the orphanage, gradually work their magic
The Instrumentalist suffers from the predictability of these themes. Novels about the erasure of brilliant women from the historical record are by now so numerous that most readers will be able to guess from the start precisely how the story will turn out. Fortunately, this rarely detracts from the energy of the scenes that capture the high-wire thrill of performance ... Alive to both the glories and cruelties of creating immortal music, The Instrumentalist is a vivid evocation of this Faustian bargain.
Harriet Constable infuses historical fact with richly wrought fictional details ... A strong sense of social justice, righting an historical wrong, pulses through the novel – and while fiction with an agenda doesn’t always make for the most interesting prose, Constable’s is as eloquent as Anna Maria’s violin ... Less relatable, perhaps, is its unambiguously happy ending.
