Prelude (Katherine Forrester Vigneras series)

Note: this book is an excerpt of L'Engle's first book The Small Rain, and was reissued for teenagers (the original is an adult novel). The author "tells the story of Katherine Forrester, an imaginative and intensely creative young American girl who yearns to become a concert pianist, as was her mother. As she learns how to accept the conflicts of her unorthodox home life and then her fellow students in a boarding school in Switzerland, we follow Katherine through all the torment, loneliness, and adorations and passions of a fifteen-year-old girl as she tries to realize her ambitions in the tumultuous world of the arts and make her own way to maturity.