"He would be directing the orchestra, I realized, and the premonition in his words appeared before me in all its future splendor, him a young man in a red coat, weaving his music to life. I would be on the ground, staring upward to see my brother at the top of the upside-down tree. I would be a lady with feathers in her wig and no quill in her hand, looking on in silence."

This book made me feel sad. And not the normal kind of sad we feel when a beloved character dies, there is this empty feeling that I feel due to the injustice of it all.
This is the story of wanting to be remembered long after one is dead. To live forever in the hearts of people, until the end of time.

""I want what is mine,” I said. My talent. My work. The right to be remembered. The memory of me to exist."

Marie Anna Mozart could have been as big as her brother, but the world wouldn't let her because she was a girl. This book is about the sister who lived in her brother's shadow. She was every bit the child prodigy and genius Wolfgang was; her only shortcoming was her gender.
Before reading this book, I assumed that Marie Lu created Nannerl for the sake of the story, a big What If story that was inspired in part by Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. In A Room of One's Own, Woolf talks about a hypothetical sister of Shakespeare, who would have never been able to shine along with her brother, because of the conditions and barriers built for women in the Elizabethan age. Even when I had finished the book, I believed that Nannerl existed only in the story. But the author's note at the end confirmed that Nannerl did indeed exist, and she was as much of a musical genius as in the book. She composed music, traveled with her brother during her childhood to perform for kings and queens. Some historians have even detected her handwriting in Wolfgang's music notes.

"Perhaps I would never be remembered in the same way as my brother. Perhaps, in the world’s eyes, I would never be what I wanted to be. Perhaps the only one who would ever hold me in his heart would be Woferl. But when I was gone, my work would survive, immortalized on paper, embedded in my brother’s mind. Locked away inside me, carried on through him. No one could take that piece of my soul away."

This might easily be my favorite Marie Lu book yet. As always, she is her best when writing fantasy. Marie Lu took 12 years to polish and perfect this book, and suffice to say, the effort shows through.
The Kingdom of Back is written in a musical and whimsical tone, yet it does not shy away from the injustice of 18th-century sexism.
The largest takeaway from this book was how it played with my emotions. I knew before starting that Nannerl would not have a happy ending, but still, the final few chapters, along with the author's note made me feel so sad and angry at the world. Marie Lu has always had this skill of messing with my emotions, but this time she hit me the hardest.
A wonderful yet sad story about the woman behind the legend that was Mozart.

"What legacy could Nannerl have left if she’d been given the kind of attention and access that her brother enjoyed? What beautiful creations were lost to us forever because Nannerl was a woman? How many other countless talents have been silenced by history, whether for their gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, or socioeconomic circumstances."