Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm is Laura Warrell’s debut novel about a jazz trumpet player named Circus. In the final lines, the wind gets the spotlight alongside Koko. I deep dived into this detail to find out why.
Ending Scene Summary
The novel ends as a chilly Boston wind sweeps over Circus’s daughter Koko, a recent high school graduate with a promising future ahead of her. Surprisingly, she welcomes the cold touch. She’s steady in this moment, hopeful and solid, listening to her father play their song.
Character Growth
At the end of the book, I was so happy reading that Koko “sensed her own solitude” when the wind touched her. It sounds strange, but this tiny detail was a huge sign of her character’s growth. Three years earlier, at 15, she had no capacity to receive a cold wind, especially in a vulnerable moment.
At 15, she discovered her teacher-crush was a pedophile. Moments later, outside school, a cold wind blows sand in her eye. The wind temporarily blinds this grieving girl, who also feels so very unseen.
It’s really cool to do a line-for-line comparison of the cold wind on page 351 and the cold wind on page 41. Check out the synchronicity in the table below.
Page 41 Mirrors Page 351, Line for Line
| The cold wind in Koko’s First Chapter Ready, the Heart, p 41 | The cold wind in Koko’s Final Chapter Outro, p 351 |
|---|---|
| cold breeze drifted | wind shifted and sent a chill |
| She wiped her face | freshly cleaned skin |
| Like a person who only seemed to be there | she sensed her own solitude |
Full Quotes: Compare 41 and 351 in Full
Setting: Outside Highschool (freshman on bleachers)
“A cold breeze drifted down the street and blew something into her eye. When she rubbed it, she saw the black mascara smudged on her fingers like ash. She wiped her face into her shirt, rubbing hard at her rouged cheeks and painted mouth. The makeup left a strange splotch in the white cloth like a mistake she’d made in art class. Like a person who only seemed to be there.”
Ready, the Heart, p 41
Setting: Outside Highschool (senior, graduated)
“Koko would forget most of these details, save for one. That the wind shifted and sent a chill across her freshly cleaned skin so that she sensed her own solitude in a way that no longer frightened her as she walked bare and unhindered toward what was new.”
Outro, p 351
Other Windy Moments in Koko’s High School Years
ANNOTATE FOR CHARACTER STUDY
Page 19 – The Breeze Tattoo
Sitting on the windy bleachers after school, Koko is moments away from letting senior girls tattoo her arm with a hot sewing needle and sharpie ink.
She’s craving to be seen as pretty by these girls and by the boys horsing around the field below them.
The seniors misguidedly suggest a swirling breeze tattoo for Koko. They mistake her for Bree, another freshman getting tattoos. She brushes off the slight, but how can it not add to her sense of invisibility?
She never got that tattoo. In fact, at the end of the book, at 18, her skin is pointedly clean, “bare and unhindered.” She doesn’t feel invisible or alone, and she feels at home in her body.
Page 146 – Scorching Air
Under the looming gaze of the Sanibel Island boys, Koko feels “scorching air.” A few pages later, Koko grabs her crush’s lighter “from the air” and challenges him to a scorching dare (149).
Page 295 – Comforting Air
Circus opens Koko’s window. He feels the fresh air and settles into the reality that Koko will soon live with him.
“The warm air outside flowed in through Koko’s window, and Circus relaxed into it.”
What Goes Around, p 295
Page 334 – Frustrated, Stuffy Air
Dayton’s basement is pretty dank when Koko first goes there. Later, on a more formative night in Dayton’s basement, the air is literally and figuratively cleaned it up, clearing the way for intimacy (p 348).
Page 350 – Music in the Wind
“The trumpet sounding in the air.”
Outro, p 350
In the final pages, Koko’s father picks up the trumpet after three years of not playing, breaking his musical silence with the special song Koko that he made up together.
Thematic, Jazzy Thoughts on Wind in This Novel
The trumpet is a wind instrument. Its music requires moving air, the human breath. The narrator of Circus’s and Koko’s story seemed attuned to that fact and pays particular attention to the air around characters, especially Koko and Circus. Wind imagery appears over a dozen times in the book.
Related to Wind and Breath: You might notice a lot of lip and mouth imagery as you read too (including injuries).
Annotate With Sara 