Product Description

Every gift has a price . . .

Every piece of lace has a secret . . .

My name is Towner Whitney. No, that's not exactly true. My real first name is Sophya. Never believe me. I lie all the time. . . .

Towner Whitney, the self-confessed unreliable narrator of The Lace Reader, hails from a family of Salem women who can read the future in the patterns in lace, and who have guarded a history of secrets going back generations, but the disappearance of two women brings Towner home to Salem and the truth about the death of her twin sister to light.

The Lace Reader is a mesmerizing tale that spirals into a world of secrets, confused identities, lies, and half-truths in which the reader quickly finds it's nearly impossible to separate fact from fiction, but as Towner Whitney points out early on in the novel, "There are no accidents."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #144236 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08-01
• Released on: 2008-07-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 400 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780061624766
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, August 2008: Brunonia Barry dreamt she saw a prophecy in a piece of lace, a vision so potent she spun it into a novel. The Lace Reader retains the strange magic of a vivid dream, though Barry's portrayal of modern-day Salem, Massachusetts--with its fascinating cast of eccentrics--is reportedly spot-on. Some of its stranger residents include generations of Whitney women, with a gift for seeing the future in the lace they make. Towner Whitney, back to Salem from self-imposed exile on the West Coast, has plans for recuperation that evaporate with her great-aunt Eva's mysterious drowning. Fighting fear from a traumatic adolescence she can barely remember, Towner digs in for answers. But questions compound with the disappearance of a young woman under the thrall of a local fire-and-brimstone preacher, whose history of violence against Whitney women makes the situation personal for Towner. Her role in cop John Rafferty's investigation sparks a tentative romance. And as they scramble to avert disaster, the past that had slipped through the gaps in Towner's memory explodes into the present with a violence that capsizes her concept of truth. Readers will look back at the story in a new light, picking out the clues in this complex, lovely piece of work. --Mari Malcolm

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In Barry's captivating debut, Towner Whitney, a dazed young woman descended from a long line of mind readers and fortune tellers, has survived numerous traumas and returned to her hometown of Salem, Mass., to recover. Any tranquility in her life is short-lived when her beloved great-aunt Eva drowns under circumstances suggesting foul play. Towner's suspicions are taken with a grain of salt given her history of hallucinatory visions and self-harm. The mystery enmeshes local cop John Rafferty, who had left the pressures of big city police work for a quieter life in Salem and now finds himself falling for the enigmatic Towner as he mourns Eva and delves into the history of the eccentric Whitney clan. Barry excels at capturing the feel of smalltown life, and balances action with close looks at the characters' inner worlds. Her pacing and use of different perspectives show tremendous skill and will keep readers captivated all the way through.

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Ron Charles

Brunonia Barry's first novel is a compendium of women's issues stitched into a murder mystery in modern-day Salem, Mass. Originally self-published, The Lace Reader later became the subject of a multi-million-dollar bidding war among New York publishers. Now it's being re-released as the first installment of a planned trilogy with a printing of 200,000 copies and all the marketing tie-in gimmicks of a new deodorant, including a sweepstakes, a "pitch kit" with a walking tour map of Salem, and something the publisher ominously describes as an "early widget disseminated online in a viral consumer campaign."

Beneath all this hype is a moderately entertaining story of three generations in a setting rich with Wiccan wisdom and deadly misogyny. One of the pleasures that runs through The Lace Reader is Barry's witty depiction of Salem. If you haven't been there, it's hard to imagine how completely the town's beauty is upstaged by the crassness of businesses that celebrate and profit from the murder of accused witches in the late 17th century. Barry has a kinder take on her hometown than I do, but she captures the way it remains suspended between past and present, tragedy and kitsch.

The narrator, an endearing woman with a self-deprecating sense of humor, introduces herself as Towner Whitney. Keep her first instruction in mind throughout: "Never believe me," she says. "I lie all the time. I am a crazy woman." I won't spoil this slow, complicated plot except to say that it's heavily back-loaded with revelations that change everything.

Her family, the Whitneys, come from old New England stock. The men made their fortunes in shipping and shoes and then faded away. But the women remain, and they "have taken quirky to a new level of achievement." Just off the coast, Towner's notorious mother maintains a shelter for abused women on a tiny, inaccessible island inhabited by wild dogs. Living without electricity or running water, she and her young women grow flax for their lace, which attracts female customers across the country.

Meanwhile, Towner's Great-Aunt Eva is an old-school Transcendentalist who owns a ladies' tearoom and conducts etiquette classes for wealthy Boston children. "But what Eva will be remembered for," Towner tells us, "is her uncanny ability to read lace. People come from all over the world to be read by Eva, and she can tell your past, present, and future pretty accurately just by holding the lace in front of you and squinting her eyes." This clairvoyant practice, which serves as the heart of the novel, is entirely Barry's invention, but it's so evocative and ingenious that I'm sure lace-reading charlatans are already setting up shop somewhere.

The story opens as Towner is recovering from a hysterectomy in California and receives word that her beloved Great-Aunt Eva has disappeared while swimming in the Salem harbor. No other calamity could draw Towner back home, which she fled years earlier when she was so mentally unbalanced that she had to be hospitalized. But she screws up her courage and flies back, hoping to discover her aunt's whereabouts. What she finds instead is Eva's friendly ghost, her mother just as quarrelsome as ever and a scary cult leader named Cal, who rules over a violent band of anti-female followers called, of course, Calvinists.

Was Towner's aunt a victim of foul play? Can Towner reconcile with her strange mother? Why is Cal so hell-bent on driving Towner out of Salem again?

From the threads of these mysteries, Barry spins a tale of magic, sexual abuse and family reconciliation. But this book isn't so much lacework as a crazy quilt of patched plot lines and literary styles: Episodes of romantic comedy suddenly give way to gothic excess or white-knuckle suspense, only to fade into long stretches of rumination, a weird amalgamation of The Friday Night Knitting Club and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." And through it all, its feminist themes sound 1970s fresh: "They came to get you because you were a woman alone in the world," Barry writes, "or because you were different, because your hair was red, or because you had no children of your own and no husband to protect you. Or maybe even because you owned property that one of them wanted." (For a more sophisticated and chilling novel of misogynist repression, read Maggie O'Farrell's recent The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox.)

Much of the first 100 pages seems fuzzy as Barry sets up Towner's story while obfuscating and disguising details -- the better to shock us at the end. It's difficult to get a fix on the family relationships among these characters because, as Towner warns, her memory has been scrambled by shock therapy. You can look for clues in the epigraphs that begin each chapter -- pithy quotations from The Lace Reader's Guide, written by Great-Aunt Eva as an instruction manual for other fabric psychics: "No two Readers will ever see the same images in the lace," she advises. "What is seen is determined entirely by perspective." If you're the kind of person who copies such sayings on index cards and sticks them on your refrigerator, you'll love these little ornaments, but if you're the kind of person who mocks those people, you may want to peer into the lace and see yourself reading a different novel.

The best part of the book comes halfway through when we begin reading a journal that Towner wrote back in 1981 "as some kind of therapy" after the mysterious and traumatic events that sent her running from home. It makes for a gripping section, full of dark melodrama: wind-swept cliffs, a moonlit suicide, a violent demon stalking young girls. I'm sorry it takes so long to reach this part, and I was sorrier to see it end, but it generates enough heat to propel the novel toward its revelatory finale, complete with a mob wielding torches.

Having untangled so many false leads and sewn up the great mystery at the heart of Towner's trauma (it's a doozy), Barry would seem to have left herself little material for the next two installments, but I wonder if those future volumes, unburdened of all this exposition, won't actually be more effective. She's created a marvelously bizarre cast of characters (living and dead) in a uniquely colorful town, and there are enough riveting sections here to illustrate what she can do when she lets loose, grabs her broom and flies.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

The most difficult review I've ever written ...
... because what to say about this brilliant book without surrendering its secrets? Other readers compare it to The Sixth Sense, and I can't disagree. This is a novel that, once finished, compels you to go back and start again. And once the end has stripped you of your original assumptions, the truth behind Towner's slant on earlier scenes springs out so that you wonder how you missed it. However, while the end is the most obvious conversation point of the book, it has merit beyond its final twist.

At first, Towner seems slightly flat and slow to develop, but by the end, a look back to understand the "whole" Towner reveals her depth. She and Rafferty are memorable and sympathetic (I did wish for more of Rafferty), but even secondary characters like Eva, May, Ann, and Jack are given the breath of realism. The setting is almost a character in itself, a living patchwork of place and time.

Those who call this book a "page-turner" seem to be labeling it from the perspective of having finished it. The swelling tension of the last hundred pages is difficult to put down, but the first hundred certainly do not skim past (they might more so the second time around as one scours for clues to the truth). This book creeps at first, wraps tendrils around its readers to pull us in and under, slowly builds our trust in Towner as narrator, even though she's told us from page one, "I lie all the time." By mid-book, we see the world through Towner's eyes and forget that she's warned us not to.

Brunonia Barry astutely writes Rafferty's voice more straightforward and less poetic than Towner's. The two chapters toward the end, which come from two secondary characters, jarred me a bit, but their perspectives are necessary to a full understanding of events. Normally a point-of-view pedant, I was able to forgive this in appreciation of the entire book.

Barry's style does fluctuate somewhat; she can write one paragraph of lovely or stunning imagery and the next of lackluster sentences like "He parked the car. He walked her to the door." At times, I felt as if I were reading a juxtaposition of Jodi Picoult and Ernest Hemingway. However, I'd be unfair not to note that I have the advance copy of this book, not the final edit. Some of the stilted paragraphs may well be re-worked by the time this book hits the shelves. If not, I still can't consider this a fatal flaw; the story is too good for that.

If you love a story constructed around point of view, if you love a story of broken people who find each other and don't give up on healing, if you love a story whose seemingly scrambled threads is really a perfect pattern ... if you love good literature, give your time to this book. It will reward you.

great promise, ultimately disappointing
My mother, who is now 75, told me of reading a suggestion last year; specifically, how to decide whether to continue reading a book to the end. On the assumption that as one gets older, one has less time to waste, the suggestion was to subtract one's age from 100 and give that many pages for a book to "hook" you, the reader. Thus, by age 99, authors are given little margin for error. This one "hooked" me sufficiently to be read at age 82. And continued to hook me for the next 340-some-odd pages. As though taking blocks out of a bucket and carefully laying them together for a complex and exotic construction, Barry lays out clues and tidbits that tantalize the reader. After such careful construction building a masterful story, Barry simply upends the bucket and dumps the remaining blocks on the reader in an ending reminiscent of "The Sixth Sense". This plot twist comes too harshly, is too disjointed and confusing, and is ultimately disappointing.

Nothing is missing but an older lady in this mystery
The Whitney women can all read lace, but Towner Whitney doesn't want any part of it, and has left Salem Massachusetts and Yellow Dog Island to get away from all the bad memories of her childhood home and the lace readings. Living in L.A. she has no intention of returning.

The book starts when she receives a call from her brother telling her that her 80-something-year-old Great Aunt Eva is missing and she must return home. Towner is recovering from a surgical procedure and had been thinking of the gift that her Great Aunt Eva had recently sent to her. It was a lace-making pillow, used for making Ipswich lace. The lace making and the reading of lace had been a tradition of the Whitney women, and Towner was no exception. Although she wants no part of it anymore, she loves her aunt and feels she has to face her bad memories and go home. Salem and Yellow Dog Island are places filled with fearful bad memories.

Towner returns after being away for over 15 years and is immediately entrenched in all the troubles of the past. It is interesting to follow the writing of author Barry as she writes through the eyes of Towner, who sometimes lives in her dreams of the past. The story is kept fresh with trying to determine if what Towner is thinking is real, or the memories from childhood twisted over time.

Of course there is the love interest in Rafferty, the detective who is assigned to the case, as well as all the other quirky characters. Salem women who are Witches and selling their wares in the small shops on the square, and the women of Yellow Dog Island and their lace, making kept this book moving along nicely.

The Lace Reader is quite an interesting book. Brunonia Barry pulled me in right away with her way of including an excerpt from The Lace Readers Guide, at the beginning of each chapter. The Salem history, entwined with the story of Towner and the strange group of characters kept me glued to this book to the end.

Armchair Interviews says: Women, lace, and a missing older lady makeup an interesting read.