In an ambitious debut, a wounded heroine returns home to confront
ghosts and hallucinations, bereavements and beatings, a hellfire
preacher with a witch-hunting flock and a murky family history with
many missing pieces.It's been 15 years since Towner Whitney,
descended from a long line of Salem eccentrics, fled the town,
following her twin sister's death and her own incarceration in a
psychiatric hospital where she received shock therapy after
claiming to have killed vicious Cal Boynton, whose abuse left his
wife brain-damaged and blind. Now, Towner's back, summoned by the
disappearance of her great-aunt Eva, preeminent lace reader (it's a
skill similar to reading tea leaves, but using the intricate
hand-made fabric instead), whose body is soon found at sea. Eva's
funeral is disrupted by the Calvinists, a fearsome religious group
led by supposedly reformed Cal, currently suspected of further
abuse or possibly worse by the local cop, Detective Rafferty, an
ex-alcoholic from New York who starts to date Towner. Over-egged
pudding doesn't even begin to describe the torrent of content and
genres in Barry's first novel, which interweaves wise and
half-crazed women, a gothic past involving a suicidal leap from a
storm-tossed cliff and an occasionally thriller-ish present which
includes Towner and a pregnant teen making a superhuman underwater
escape from a burning building. Unusual and otherworldly, this is a
blizzard of a story which surprisingly manages to pull together its
historical, supernatural and psychiatric elements.A survivor's tale
of redemption, reached via a long and winding road. (Kirkus
Reviews)
Drawn by family. Driven by fear. Haunted by fate. Would knowing the
future be a gift or a burden? Or even a curse!? The Whitney women
of Salem, Massachusetts are renowned for reading the future in the
patterns of lace. But the future doesn't always bring good news --
as Towner Whitney knows all too well. When she was just fifteen her
gift sent her whole world crashing to pieces. She predicted -- and
then witnessed -- something so horrific that she vowed never to
read lace again, and fled her home and family for good. Salem is a
place of ghosts for Towner, and she swore she would never return.
Yet family is a powerful tie and fifteen years later, Towner finds
herself back in Salem. Her beloved great-aunt Eva has suddenly
disappeared -- and when you've lived a life like Eva's, that could
mean real trouble. But Salem is wreathed in sickly shadows and
whispered half-memories. It's fast becoming clear that the ghosts
of Towner's fractured past have not been brought fully into the
light. And with them comes the threat of terrifying new disaster.A
literary page-turner with depth, narrative power and a story that
novels like 'The Thirteenth Tale' can only dream of, 'The Lace
Reader' is a bewitching and tightly plotted read.
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