Product Description

She can hear the music in peoples' souls.

Mary Beth and her younger sister Leeann are trying to support themselves in their small Southern hometown. So Mary Beth works to make ends meet by practicing her own unique talent: "song reading." By making sense of the song lyrics people have stuck in their heads, Mary Beth can help people make sense of their lives. In no time, Mary Beth's readings have the entire town singing her praises, including the handsome scientist Ben, who falls hard for Mary Beth and her unearthly intuition.

What happens when she can't make out the lyrics?

When Mary Beth reveals a long-muted secret in the community, however, she turns off the music and gives up song reading for good. Soon everyone's lives are out of tune: Leeann worries she'll never graduate from high school, and Ben can't conduct his experiments. Without Mary Beth's music the town's silence is louder than ever. Could it be that all the lyrics to all those foolish love songs really aren't so foolish after all?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #761257 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.com Review
Two sisters, Leeann and Mary Beth, have the debut novel The Song Reader firmly in their grip. Author Lisa Tucker seems almost entranced by her main characters, a teenager and her older sister whose mother is dead and father has disappeared. They've put together a cheery and eccentric life in their small midwestern hometown. Mary Beth--beautiful, empathetic and smart--practices an art she calls song reading. Clients come to her and tell her the songs that are stuck in their head, and she decodes the song to help them with their problems. Says her little sister Leeann, the novel's narrator: "She could take a customer who had all kinds of problems--poverty and family quarrels and lost love and even illness--and point her finger at the one thing that, if they found it and dealt with it, would give them the strength to handle all the rest." Leeann sees Mary Beth's song reading--and everything else about her sister--as admirable and glorious. But Mary Beth's gift leads her to a secret truth about a prominent neighbor, and the fragile structure of the girls' orphaned life comes tumbling down. Each secret seems to domino another until the sisters' whole complex emotional history is laid bare. The Song Reader can be a little willfully twee with its wacky characters and unlikely scenarios, but Tucker has so thoroughly imagined her protagonists' psychological workings that the book exerts an undeniable pull. --Claire Dederer

From Publishers Weekly
Tucker's assured debut novel is an achingly tender narrative about grief, love, madness and crippling family secrets. Preteen Leeann Norris introduces readers to her world: recently orphaned when her mother was killed in a car accident, she lives with her older sister, Mary Beth, who supports them by waiting tables and performing "song readings" for locals in their small Missouri town. Rather than reading palms to tell people's future, Mary Beth analyzes the songs stuck in their heads, explaining what the song fragments reveal about her clients' psyches. The plot device is fascinating, but what cleaves the reader to the page is the relationship between the two sisters-one determined to track down their long-missing father, the other equally resistant to looking at the past. When Mary Beth's song reading uncovers a local scandal, the community turns against her, and her resolve to help those around her crumbles. Leeann must become the stronger sister, and her quest to find their father finally succeeds, though not in the way she'd hoped. Tucker's dexterous portraits of the fragile family dynamics expose quirky and compelling characters. Her expertly sprung revelations will surprise readers. This intoxicating debut may remind them of Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Pat Conroy's Prince of Tides, but it's not lost in their shadows.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-Leeann Norris, 12, comes of age in the midst of an almost overwhelmingly dysfunctional family. After her mother is killed in a car crash, Mary Beth, 23, takes on the care of her younger sister in the absence of their father. She supports the two of them, and eventually a hyperactive foster child with learning problems, by waitressing and "song reading," a skill she developed to help people uncover their problems by charting the songs running through their heads. This occupation also enables her to obscure her own guilt and shame over choosing to love her selfish and victimized mother more than her insecure and inept father. When one of her clients attempts suicide, Mary Beth's fragile structure collapses and she is sent off to a mental hospital. Leeann slowly finds out or remembers small pieces of information she uses to put the picture, and the family, together again. Her voice is honest and intelligent and the other characters are interesting and believable, though each one has an emotional disaster to deal with. Both an attempted date rape and her first loving sexual encounter are sensitively handled, and Leeann's ultimate resolution is hopeful and fitting. While loaded with possible pitfalls, the situations are believable, Leeann is authentic, and teens will recognize the feelings, if not all of the events.
Susan H. Woodcock, Fairfax County Public Library, Chantilly, VA
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

A rare gift
Every once in a while a book comes along that inspires us and moves us to tears all at the same time all the while making it hard for us to tear our eyes away. That's what this book did for me: It gave me the gift of an equally rare and wonderful reading experience that will resonate within me for a long, long time.

The Song Reader is the story of two sisters who are seemingly alone against the world. Mary Beth is the legal custodian for her younger sister, LeAnn. Mary Beth supports them both as a waitress and a Song Reader, which if you're anything like me and associate a certain year with what was playing on the radio, or your favorite song with a paticularly happy time in your life you will understand the concept of song reading. Through these girls' indescibably strong bond they somehow make it work, but their life certainly is not without struggle and pain. Mary Beth doesn't understand LeAnn and vice versa and it's the unanswered questions and years of bottled up anguish that [possibly may] tear this family apart.

I am a [fan] for a coming of age story, but this one is a cut above all the rest. LeAnn is struggling with her feelings and finding her place in the world. Both she and her Sister, Mary Beth are honest, hearwrenching characters that will take up residence in your heart and mind for a long time.

Lisa Tucker has out done herself on her first time out. She has important things to say and a very unique way of saying them. If she hasn't already, I'm sure she will soon become quite an important strong voice in cotemporary fiction. I am anxiously awaiting another wonderful novel by Ms. Tucker!!

Let me add my voice -------
in praise of Lisa Tucker's first novel.

Tucker's story winds around the "gift" that big sister Mary Beth has been given in a small southern town. Mary Beth, a waitress raising her younger sister and a small adopted son, is a caretaker by nature. She discovers a unique talent, "reading people's lives". Unlike a fortune teller, MaryBeth talks to others about the songs that are important to them, and have been important to them throughout their lives. Mary Beth does "readings" and keeps charts on everyone who comes to her for help, and her advice, gained through an analysis of the lyrics that keep popping up in a client's head at odd moments. To Mary Beth ..."I have a calling in life" .. and her help is usually so on track that a large following in their little town relies on the premise that their own songs are not random, but rather that they have meaning just waiting to be uncovered; something that, it seems, only Mary Beth can do.

It's an interesting premise, and it is background music to the story told by LeeAnn, Mary's Beth's adolescent sister. To LeeAnn, the gift inspires others and puts their little family in the heart of the town....

"... wishing I could go back to when the music was like a spirit moving through our town, giving words to what we felt, connecting us all."

As the tale unfolds, parallel secrets about a prominent town citizen are uncovered through song reading, leading Mary Beth's reputation to tarnish, and her spirits to unravel. At the same time, secrets of their own family -- why their father disappeared, and what role their deceased mother played, are covered up by Mary Beth, who thinks that she is sheltering LeeAnn from knowledge that will hurt her.

Eventually, unhinged by the responsibility for both the family and the town's opinion, Mary Beth begins to fade, and it is then that LeeAnn takes over the indomitable spirit that has kept them going for years.

Although based on a unique and whimsical premise, Tucker's book is really about relationships, the bond between sisters, and about never giving up, no matter how difficult the terrain of your life. Tucker writes lyrically and well, bringing each and every character to life, including the mystical father figure, who finally comes to be a part of their lives again. Both sisters in the tale finally find the one thing, the love between the two of them, that will give them "the strength to handle all the rest".

I so look forward to more from this author, and highly recommend this lovely debut.

Original, wise, thought provoking
I didn't pick up The Song Reader expecting a deep novel. The cover seemed "hip girl," and the idea of song reading, interesting enough, but deep? Yes. Deep is the word, along with other words like original and even profound. The relationships between the people in The Song Reader are developed with a sensitivity and nuance and wisdom that is unusual in any novel, and astonishing in a first work.

Each character is utterly unique and yet as familiar as some part of ourselves. Leeann is the wise eye of the book, watching over her family, wishing she could protect them, and understanding them in ways they can't understand her. Henry, the father, is as odd as any fictional character I've encountered, and yet Tucker makes him make sense, quite an achievement. Mary Beth, the song reader and ostensible star of the book, a hero because of her ability to help others, is both larger than life and completely vulnerable. This is what makes the story so fascinating, watching what happens when a gifted woman like Mary Beth, a woman with a big heart and a big soul, collapses under the weight of her own charity--and knowing, tragically, that her greatness and her grief are so entwined that to starve one would be to starve them both.

This is a great first novel.