Sixteen-year-old Rune Germaine has synesthesia, a perceptive phenomena (which really exists) where stimuli for one sense triggers other senses too. For example, sounds have colors to Rune.
But Runeโs synesthesia is connected to another condition, of which she appears to be the only possessor. Whenever she hears an operatic soprano aria, she has to belt it out, even if it kills her. Even as a toddler who could barely speak her native language, she could flawlessly sing along, with an apparently adult set of pipes, in perfect Italian or Russian, to whatever her violinist father was listening to on the classical radio station.
Then Runeโs father passed away from a terminal illness. The girl was six years old then, and her grandmother claimed she was cursed and started trying to murder her. In very practical ways, such as drowning the child in a wooden crate filled with water. Or setting fire to her second-grade classroom with the class inside a year later. It never worked, and Grandma went to jail in her native land of France. (Howard keeps insisting that Granny Germaine is imprisoned in Versailles. I think she means the Bastille).
We rejoin Rune in the present, driving through the countryside surrounding Paris with her practical-minded mom, who canโt wait to drop the kid off at her new school so she can get back stateside and have some quality time with her new fiancรฉ. What do you mean, you've heard this one before?
Runeโs new school is an arts academy in a rehabilitated historical opera house, called RoseBlood. With the capitalized B in the middle. This is a bizarre name for any establishment, let alone a school, but itโs far from the most macabre, contrived, or ridiculously emo thing in this storyโฆ
Rune is scared to attend RoseBlood because sheโs Done Research on The Internetโcomplete with โchat roomsโโand her findings suggest that RoseBlood is the self-same building wherein the events of The Phantom of the Opera took place in the late nineteenth century. Her mom tries to calm her down by insisting that โLerouxโs book is just fiction.โ This whole dialogue sounds more like a Wikipedia entry than a conversation between an angsty girl and the mom who canโt wait to get rid of her for a few months, a problem which will run throughout the book.
As they enter the grounds of the remote school, Rune spots a tall, lithe male figure in a cape and half-mask pruning the rosebushes that edge the road. She tells her mom, and her mom promptly dismisses it.
Eventually, Rune settles into school life, at this school with an improbably huge budget and minimal academic program. She makes a quick group of friends, who are diverse and likeable but none of whom are given much development. Also, all of these kids break into her room and snoop on a regular basis, which is not supposedly in character for any of them, and this does not bother Rune. Interestingly, this school is in Paris, but every student there is American.
But she also experiences embarrassing flare-ups of her โneed to sing.โ And creepy things keep happening on campusโฆand the masked man keeps appearing in her mirrors, in the corner of her eye. She hears mysterious violin music.
Eventually she gets lured into an underground chamber where she meets the shadowy presence. At first she believes him to be the Phantom, but it turns out that heโs actually Etalon, called Thorn, the adopted son of the Erik from the story. The original Opera Ghostโthe O.G.O.G., if you willโis still kicking, and he needs both Rune and Thorn as part of his latest evil scheme.
.
