Karen’s Blog

The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry

This was a really fascinating novel, rife with familiar Massachusetts history, and with a story that is at once simple and complicated. I grew up in Massachusetts, and live here still, so of course studied the whole Salem Witch phenomenon in school, and am even descended from the one accused witch who was not hung.*

This is set in modern Salem, and around a family of women who are lace readers - like fortune tellers, only they look through lace, not a crystal ball, to divine events and visions. They are not witches, nor do they claim to be, though the modern followers of Wicca are friendly to them. The main character is a “Towner,” a mentally-damaged woman, Towner, whose estranged mother lives on a harbor island, and whose beloved Great Aunt has just died. A phone call from her brother brings her back to Salem from her current life in California.

How Towner, whose own memory has gaps after a traumatic incident in her teen years led her to McLeans**, and electroshock therapy. Confronting the town and the home, the memories and the people she fled years before is a continual process of discovery, reminders, and an effort to distinguish reality from visions, it is a struggle for Towner to make her own way through the aftermath of her aunt’s mysterious death, and keep her head above water. Add in her own dead twin, her mother’s agoraphobia, relationships she had run from, her mother’s work helping victims of domestic violence, her uncle’s new status as a religious cult leader, and new relationships, the story keeps you wondering at every turn of the page. And, as one of the founders of DogoftheDay.com I do have to mention that semiferal Golden Retrievers play a significant role as well, and one in particular becomes her guardian and friend.

That in the process you end up learning (or being reminded of) local history and industry - Ipswich lace was a real, quite literal cottage industry at one time, lobstermen still work the Massachusetts coast - and family dysfunction and what it can do to people - is just a plus to what is an excellent good book.

The ending blew me away. I literally finished the book, set it down, then went back and reread the last chapters just to make sure I caught everything. I heartily recommend this book.

*Giles Corey, who was instead pressed to death. Ma, looking at the build of the men in her immediate family, figures he was probably barrel-chested and figured he could stand it.

**Yup, it’s a real place, and still in operation, a world-class hospital for the mentally ill, just one town away from me in Belmont, MA. Most people know of it through Sylvia Plath’s time there, or from the movie “Girl Interrupted.”