Someday Everything Will All Make Sense

Someday Everything Will All Make Sense follows Luther van der Loon, an eccentric harpsichordist and professor of early music, as he navigates the stages of grief after the untimely death of his mother. Luther obsesses over burial practices, rails against the funerary industry, and institutes a personal injury suit against the Chinese takeout whose "sloppy methods" he blames for his mother choking on a wonton.

Luther detests modern music and the equal temperament, the tuning fiction upon which it is based. He believes, like Kepler and the greatest thinkers of the Renaissance, that music is to be constructed according to the divine Pythagorean ratios.

""" LaHines’ tale paints a robust picture of a suffering neurotic stuck in his sorrow, her protagonist recalling a Laurence Sterne character. . . . An admirable addition to that venerable category [of] novels to find humor in loss.""- Kirkus Reviews

“Set in New York City, Carol LaHines’ debut novel, Someday Everything Will All Make Sense, combines early music, Chinese food, litigation, and love in a hilarious defense of individuality. . . Luther’s irrationality makes him both laughable and loveable. His early music obsession, laced throughout the narrative like a sticky cobweb that won’t go away, offers metaphors for love and loss. He feels his mother’s memory like an overtone ringing after a note sounds. He and Cecilia “vibrate sympathetically” with each other, like tones in a chord. Luther’s healing comes in the company of his zany early music friends and their romp through neighborhood bars. As a backdrop, New York is portrayed not as a place to get lost, but to be found. In its ethnic bars and restaurants, he lets loose to enjoy himself and his mates in all their absurd glory, chanting medieval plainsong over heavy metal playing on the sound system. LaHines’ Someday Everything Will Make Sense is a comedy celebrating transformation that happens in its own due course.”-Compulsive Reader

""An original and very funny novel about a man's obsessive longing and guilt after his mother accidentally chokes on wonton soup. We follow the endearing protagonist through a period of mourning, cleverly interwoven with musical theory and an attempt to sue the Chinese take out restaurant, all brought to a hilarious finale with a last symposium on medieval music.""  --Sheila Kohler, author of Once We Were Sisters, Cracks, Dreaming for Freud, Becoming Jane Eyre, and Love Child"