THE LACE READER

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.