NY TimesBestseller

National Bestseller

Starred Review – Publishers Weekly

Starred Review - Library Journal

International Acclaim (to be published in 30 languages)

Winner – 2009 Baccante Award for Best Women’s Fiction (first American author to win this award)

Winner – iTunes Best of 2008 (audio book version)

Winner – Library Journal Best of 2008 (audio book version)

Winner –Book Bloggers Best Books of 2008

Winner – 2009 New England Book Festival – Best Fiction Book

Amazon.com Best of the Month, August 2008

Barnes & Noble New Reads, January 2008

Borders Book Club Selection August & October 2008

Borders New Voices 2008 nominee

2008 Indie Next Highlights List (National Independent Booksellers)

A People Magazine People Pick

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“Finely rendered moments make this a novel to savor, a story as textured as it is imaginative… a story that readers will find as lovely as a swatch of handmade lace.”

Rocky Mountain News

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“Every now and then, a novel comes along that invites you into an imagined world and holds you there, captive, until it comes to an end. The Lace Reader is just such an invitation…This richly atmospheric story is a tale of mothers and daughters and sisters; of how we seek — and find — answers in unexpected places; of the dangers of fundamentalism. As the lace reader searches for the meaning within the delicate pattern, so these characters struggle to make sense of their lives. All this unfolds in contemporary Salem, where, as a cop named Rafferty tells his boss, ‘Witchcraft isn’t even a crime. In this town it’s a profit center.’ The Lace Reader, like the Witchcraft Museum in Salem, invites visitors to ’sit a spell.’ You’ll be glad you did.”

New Orleans Times-Picayune

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“In The Lace Reader, Barry has written one of those lovely novels that is easy to dive into and that lingers in your thoughts. The haunting questions about what exactly happened, how, when and why, will keep your brain happily digesting this book long after the covers are closed.”

St. Petersburg Times

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“Brunonia Barry has pulled off a major feat with her debut, The Lace Reader: It’s a gorgeously written literary novel that’s also a doozy of a thriller, capped with a jaw-dropping denouement that will leave even the most careful reader gasping.”

Dallas Morning News

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“The Lace Reader casts an enthralling spell…As The Lace Reader unspools, we are drawn into a whirling vortex of deceit. Barry untangles these confusing strands of mystery with an artful precision.”

Minneapolis Star Tribune

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“Barry does a fantastic job of sketching out her characters. The Whitney women, one and all, are intriguingly real.”

San Antonio Express-News

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“Surprise endings are tough to pull off–too often they aren’t a surprise to anyone but the main character. To Barry’s credit, she genuinely got me.”

Christian Science Monitor

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“A ‘romance’ in the Nathaniel Hawthorne sense of the word a dark tale of sin and guilt that blends the mundane and the fantastic, with a glimmer of redemptive hope at its core that all the Gothic trappings cannot obscure.”

Tulsa World

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“The Lace Reader unravels a magical, yet tragic family’s tale…Barry has cleverly and delightfully set us up. With one fell swoop, she cuts the last thread, and the characters she has so carefully created unravel to reveal secrets we had not even begun to guess.”

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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“Drawing comparisons to memorable gothic novels, including Rebecca and The Thirteenth Tale. Barry’s modern-day story of Towner Whitney, who has the psychic gift to read the future in lace patterns, is equally complex but darker in subject matter…Repressed memories emerge. Violent confrontations, reminiscent of the hysteria of the witch trials, explode in this complex novel…The novel’s gripping and shocking conclusion is a testament to Barry’s creativity.”

USA Today

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“Barry’s depictions of her characters’ altered states of consciousness are beautifully rendered. And The Lace Reader establishes Brunonia Barry as a force…”

The Olympian

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“The Lace Reader is a page-turner, and the ending is almost as shocking as the film ‘The Sixth Sense.’”

Salem Gazette

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“Brunonia Barry can write. Boy can she write…She knows how to set a reader up and she knows how to keep you reading. She knows how to make a character shine and how to portray a town in all its splendor and strangeness. She knows how to pace the plot. This is not only an accomplished first novel, it is an accomplished novel.”

Globe and Mail (Toronto)

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“Past and present mysteries merge in a fast-moving narrative that builds through a numerous small dramas to a theatrical conclusion.”

Katherine Turman, Elle

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“Barry weaves a suspenseful tale of witchcraft and dark mystery…Barry’s depictions of time and place are marvelously descriptive.”

Rozanne Price, Elle

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“An ambitious debut. Unusual and otherworldly, this is a blizzard of a story which manages to pull together its historical, supernatural and psychiatric elements. A survivor’s tale of redemption.”

Kirkus Reviews

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“What makes Brunonia Barry’s compulsively readable debut even more interesting is the spice added by fillips both psychic and supernatural.”

Denver Post

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“Suspenseful and literary catnip-for-book-clubs…while it’s surprisingly gritty for having ‘lace’ in the title, we’re calling this now as the beach read of ‘08.”

New York magazine

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“Brunonia Barry tells a suspenseful, fast-paced story. Her many sympathetic characters are nicely drawn and inhabit a world thick with local charm and historical detail. Barry mixes together witchcraft, madness, abused women, Red Hats, survivor guilt, memory loss, precognition, and dissociation into a heady brew that will go down easily for many readers.”

Boston Globe

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“If you choose just one novel to read in these waning days of summer, it should be the lovely and terrifically paced The Lace Reader. . . Barry has created a wholly original story, a surreal and feverish book with the smell of Massachusetts sea air practically wafting off every page.”

Bookpage

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“Brunonia Barry spins a veil of lace before the readers’ eyes, lifting it by degrees to reveal her characters’ secrets in an enchanting first novel, THE LACE READER…[Barry's narrative is] magical and believable at the same time, not unlike J.K. Rowling managed so deftly in the Harry Potter books. It’s realism with an undercurrent of natural magic, both dark and light. In the end, the lace Barry has spun is lifted from our eyes. The final pages are a revelation true to the characters and the plot.”

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

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“Barry has written a meditative, lyric novel that in its discursive storytelling style full of digressions and expository sections on interesting facts will appeal to people who enjoy savoring a book one section at a time.”

Raleigh News and Observer

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“[For] fans of Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island, Chris Bohjalian’s The Double Bind.”

Booklist

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“[Barry] may have schooled herself on Alice Hoffman and Jodi Picoult, because The Lace Reader contains trace elements of both. . .while The Lace Reader is rooted in the everyday of small-town life, it has a hallucinatory quality throughout as Towner’s vision clouds with fear.  In the end, reality shifts again as Barry delivers her final strike.  It’s hefty enough to throw everything into question and a great way to leave off a really good book.”

Daily News (NY)

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“An engrossing modern-day twist on the classic Gothic novel. . . .the story both astonishes and satisfies.  In short, The Lace Reader is great entertainment.”

Tampa Tribune

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“Gripping. . .a marvelously bizarre cast of characters (living and dead) in a uniquely colorful town.”

Washington Post Book World

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“Barry captures Salem evocatively and often wittily . . . What is real in The Lace Reader?  What is not?  To her credit Ms. Barry makes this story blithe and creepy in equal measure . . . She keeps it unpredictable. And there is much suspense invested in where all the lacunas in Towner’s impressions will lead her . . . There are clues planted everywhere.”

Janet Maslin, New York Times – July 24, 2008

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The People Pick – Recommended

“An absorbing spine-tingler set in Salem. Barry’s mystery has an irresistible pull and an ending that rattles your understanding of everything that’s come before. The Lace Reader is tailor-made for a boisterous night at the book club.”

Sue Corbett, People Magazine – August 4, 2008

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“A richly imagined saga of passion, suspense and magic.”

Time Magazine July 24, 2008

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“Barry excels at capturing the feel of small-town life, and balances action with close looks at the characters’ inner worlds. Her pacing and use of different perspectives show tremendous skill and will keep readers captivated all the way through.”

Publishers Weekly Starred Review

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“What if you could read your future in a piece of lace?…Multiple narratives often told in flashback by various long-standing town residents, while offering somewhat skewed points of view, help to advance this part-historical, part-mystery/suspense novel, building rhythmically to its shattering conclusion. Barry has previously written books for the YA fiction series “Beacon Street Girls.” In this, her first original adult novel, she combines her focus on the history of this particular community, including its witchcraft trials, religious cults, and quotidian seaport life, with her study of a fractured family seeking truth to bring us a most unusual and bewitching novel. Highly recommended.”

Library Journal Starred Review

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