The Phoenix Crown: A Novel

The Phoenix Crown shows the varying ways in which trauma and art can influence one another, as Gemma turns to her music as a sanctuary and a source of healing after the earthquake, while Reggie’s trauma renders her unable to access the artistic inspiration that allows her to paint.

After enduring the earthquake, fires, and other violence of the novel’s climax, Gemma turns to music, which has always been a place of refuge for her. Before the earthquake, she thinks, “[F]riends let you down, even the oldest of friends; men let you down; colleagues let you down. But her voice hadn’t, not yet” (101). Her art is something she can come back to when other humans have harmed her. It is also something she can come back to after a natural disaster. In the wreckage of the city, waiting for her ride, Gemma finds a piano to play and accompanies herself singing:

[S]he struck up Mozart’s ‘Laudate Dominum,’ seeing a tear slip down the cheek of the man with the bandaged head. Maybe she was as dim as her bird, singing when the world was burning down around her ears, but she couldn’t do anything else. She was a singer.