The Lace Reader

In a couple of months, I will be flown out to a secure, undisclosed location (OK, Salem, MA), to interview Brunonia Barry, the author of the this tome.

When I got the proof, my heart quailed. The Lace Reader. Doesn't make the pulse race, now does it? My spirits were lowered even further when I read the first page, which contains cryptic instructions for lace reading set down by the main character Towner's great-aunt Eva. I thought I would be subjected to a few hundred pages of How to Make an American Quilt-level guff. But thankfully, it is far more interesting than that.

Lace reading is predicting the future through lace patterns, and all the women in Towner's family can do it (and read minds): Eva, her estranged mother May, her twin sister Lyndley. The novel opens with Towner returning to Salem because Eva has drowned swimming in Salem harbour. The police can't prove anything but it seems not to have been an accident. Malevolently hovering around the periphery is Cal, Lyndley's adoptive father (he didn't adopt Towner, it's complicated). Cal, a former drunk who abused his wife and Lyndley and who may have killed Lyndley, has now turned to God and is the leader of a fundamental Christian cult who call themselves, wait for it, 'Calvinists.'

It is a deeply feminist book. The Calvinists are patriarchal and are played off against Towner's family (including her agoraphobic mother May who runs a home for abused women on an island in the harbour) and the modern day witches in Salem. In less deft hands, it could have been preachy. But Barry handles it with humour, which she manages to combine with page turning suspense, throwing in an ending that I did not see coming (turns out Vader is Luke's dad!).

I'm looking forward to meeting Barry, not least because she calls her blog The Bru-haha.