[A Solitary Blue] is the story of Jeff Greene, the guitar-playing high school boy Dicey Tillerman meets in Dicey's Song (1982)—but the connection isn't made until near the end. The story begins, matter-of-factly but with Kramer vs. Kramer pathos, when Jeff at seven finds his mother Melody's note explaining that she loves him but had to leave him to help the world's less fortunate and "make things better." Jeff is left with his stiff, expressionless father…. The summer Jeff turns 12, his mother invites him to stay with her at her grandmother's house in Charleston; and though he doesn't see much of her he is overcome with love—cherishing her memory through the year, writing monthly unanswered letters, and buying a cheap used guitar because she had played one…. The next summer Jeff returns to Charleston, but sees even less of his mother—she is off on long trips...