"when i am well
i will take you
"
At first Billy's father just seemed distant, as if he had something on his mind. Then he stopped listening to music, saying it hurt his ears. After a while he stopped eating and sleeping. And after that he just stopped. Stopped being Billy's father and his friend and became someone else. Someone who was depressed and withdrawn and wouldn't respond to treatments.
Determined to help their father, Billy and his family devise a series of unconventional therapies for him. But the strain of looking after Dad begins to wear on them all. Billy stops writing songs and starts avoiding his friends. His sister wants to suicide-proof the house. And his mother worries about losing her job because she takes so much time off. Taking care of Dad is starting to sap the strength they need to keep him alive.
"The Opposite of Music" is a powerful and realistic debut novel about the lengths a family will go to in order to save one of their own, and the strength it takes to learn how to ask for help.

This book looks at the belief held by many nineteenth-century writers, that the best tragedy should be read rather than performed. They have often been attacked for their views by later critics. The author argues that this attitude was not mere eccentricity on the part of the Roamntics. Instead, shows the extent to which they were influenced by an established and intellectually justifiable tradition in dramatic criticism, reaching back to the writings of Aristotle and Plato. She also examines the extent to which the Romantics objected to the elaborate dramatic spectacles of the 19th century, which they believed made an audience passive by appealing only to the senses. Instead, Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt argued that great literature should help people to transcend the senses by actively engaging the imagination. Thus, these three writers designed theie own essays and books to challenge readers and to provoke more dynamic thinking. Through detailed analysis of Coleridge's ""Shakespearean Criticism"" Lamb's ""On the Tragedies Of Shakespeare"" and Hazlitt's ""Characters of Shakespeare's Plays"", the author shows that in their own concern with educating the reader these Romantics anticipate twentieth-century reader response criticism, educational theory, and film criticism.