"Nell Leyshon manages to make the most extreme emotions of her characters believable and, despite the rawness of her stories, she captures them with an unequivocally poetic sensitivity."
Guardian

England, 1573. Little Ellyn's days are spent working from sunup to sundown on her family's humble farm, shoveling animal feces and being scorned and beaten by her brother Tomas de ella. Ever since her father was disabled in an accident, and even more so now that a new little sister, Agnes, has arrived in that world of misery and deprivation, everyone has to work even harder to ensure their livelihood. In this atmosphere of brutality, fatigue and filth, Ellyn's only joy is Agnes, to whom she has a very special bond.

Everything will take an unexpected turn the day Ellyn goes to the market and, driven by curiosity, enters an empty church where she hears a song like she had never heard before, a song that shakes her, that makes her float. From that precise moment a powerful desire begins to grow inside her: to enter the singing school, where young gentlemen learn to sing, but also to read and write, a place where you never go hungry and where girls access is prohibited. Her determination to fulfill her dream will lead Ellyn to rebel and pose as a boy, but how long can he keep up her deception? How long will she be able to bear those shackles imposed on the truth of her body?

Written with a formidable talent for reflecting the speech of a girl raised in a rural environment and transmitting with that very personal language an energy, a freedom and a vision of things of enormous poetic spirit, The song school tells the path without turning back of an illiterate girl who discovers that the world is vaster than she ever suspected, a beautiful and unfair world in which a gift can take you very far and prejudice condemns you for life; a world that needs to be changed, whatever it may be, to bequeath it to those we love the most.