The book imagines a next-door neighbor for Oscar named Millie, who gets into mischief with him but also appreciates his talents: Oscar hears music in everything, and Millie calls him a magician for the way he can coax melodies from his trumpet. Millie writes to Oscar during his long stay in the hospital for tuberculosis, and she encourages his earliest notes on the piano.

Set in Oscar’s true childhood neighborhood of St-Henri—now known as Little Burgundy—the book provides a wonderful sense of this 1930s neighborhood where much of Montreal’s Black working class population lived. and concludes with a page of informational text about the author’s own connection to Little Burgundy and a short biography of jazz legend Oscar Peterson.