The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry (Literary mystery/fiction)

Awesome literary debut! Poetic, mysterious.

In the town of Salem, Massachusetts, innocent women needing to be controlled were once accused of witchcraft. Now Salem plays host to a group of women who openly parade around as witches and a whole tourist industry reenacts the past in broad daylight. A new religious group calling themselves the Calvinists goes about adminishing and threatening witches and unusual or strong women. Towner's great aunt is a lace reader, a woman who can read the future in lace. Her home and the lace reader group become a sanctuary for women escaping their abusive husbands. Together this circle of women find support and strength.

Towner comes back to town after her aunt Eva goes missing, embarking on a journey that puts her life into perspective. She sees the history of Salem, Salem's current life, her own personal history and her present in a unique pattern as finely interwoven as lace. Each chapter is prefaced by a quote from the Lace Reader's Guide written by Eva describing the art, history and technique of lace reading. Towner's life is like the lace with finely woven threads all interwoven yet converging. The reader follows all the strands in her life, not as a straight direct kind of plot, but as different memories, some reliable and others imagined, all forming the uniqueness of a piece of art---the life of human being,

This novel was incredible. Talk about some twists! This novel does deal with some hard issues like spousal abuse so if you are looking for a light, happy easy read, this is not a good choice. That warning being said, this book was awesome! This is definitely one of those novels that you just have to follow with your imagination and take it where it leads you. By the end, all those narrative threads and images add up to something spectacular and rich as past and present and landscape, history and the personal all combine. This is a novel built in layers, like a person's life. Like psychology. Definitely some surprising and poetic twists towards the end. Since this is not romance, there is no guaranteed HEA...but the ending has it's own kind of happy ending that combines deep emotion, sadness, even trauma into a new beginning and a new sense of freedom. Beautifully poetic!

Blurb:

Look into the lace . . . When the eyes
begin to fill with tears and the
patience is long exhausted, there will appear a glimpse of something
not quite seen... In this moment, an image will begin to form . . . in
the space between what is real and what is only imagined.

Can
you read your future in a piece of lace? All of the Whitney women can.
But the last time Towner read, it killed her sister and nearly robbed
Towner of her own sanity. Vowing never to read lace again, her resolve
is tested when faced with the mysterious, unsolvable disappearance of
her beloved Great Aunt Eva, Salem's original Lace Reader. Told from
opposing and often unreliable perspectives, the story engages the
reader's own beliefs. Should we listen to Towner, who may be losing her
mind for the second time? Or should we believe John Rafferty, a no
nonsense New York detective, who ran away from the city to a simpler
place only to find himself inextricably involved in a psychic tug of
war with all three generations of Whitney women? Does either have the
whole story? Or does the truth lie somewhere in the swirling pattern of
the lace?

AKA Merri
Family Challenge Team: The Spine Breakers with my dh Glenn AKA Phaedrus