The Song Reader

Review Margot Livesey author of Eva Moves the Furniture [A] sparkling debut...delightful and engrossing.John Dufresne author of Louisiana Power & Light [A]n achingly beautiful and bittersweet tale.Silas House author of A Parchment of Leaves A stunning debut by a major new voice for her generation. Product Description Sure, we were a small family, but it wasn't lonely. We had the endless stream of my sister's customers and, of course, the music. Every day, all day, our stereo would play and Mary Beth would talk about the lyrics, what they really meant. Leeann lives with her beautiful older sister -- the world's first and only "song reader." Everyone in their small town thinks Mary Beth is special, and Leeann does, too. Mary Beth helps people figure out how they really feel by using the songs they can't get out of their minds. And her advice is always right. But when Mary Beth makes a terrible mistake and half the town -- including the family of the one boy Leeann cares about -- turns against Mary Beth, Leeann will have to rethink everything she knows about her own family. She will have to be the stronger sister for a change. But she will also have a chance to discover that even an "ordinary" girl like herself can sometimes figure out what the music really means... About the Author Lisa Tucker is the bestselling author of The Promised World, The Cure for Modern Life, Once Upon a Day, Shout Down the Moon and The Song Reader. Her short work has appeared in Seventeen, Pages and The Oxford American. She lives in Pennsylvania with her family. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter OneMy sister Mary Beth was a song reader. Song reading was her term for it and she invented the art as far as I know. It was kind of like palm reading, she said, but instead of using hands, she used music to read people's lives. Their music. The songs that were important to them from as far back as they could remember. The ones they turned up loud on their car radios and found themselves driving a little faster to. The ones they sang in the shower and loved the sound of their own voice singing. And of course, the songs that always made them cry on that one line nobody else even thought was sad.Her customers adored her. They took her advice -- to marry, to break it off with the low-life jerk, to take the new job, to confront their supervisor with how unfair he was -- and raved about how much better off they were. They said she was gifted. They swore she could see right into their hearts.From the beginning, my sister took it so seriously. She'd been doing readings less than a month when she had those cards printed up. Each one said in bold black letters:Mary Beth NorrisSong Reader/Life HealerLet me help you make sense of the music in your head.[Family problems a specialty.]Leave a message at 372-1891. Payment negotiable.She had to work double shifts at the restaurant to pay for the cards and the answering machine, but she said it was just part of her responsibilities now. "I have a calling in life," she told me, "and I've got to act like it."I wish I'd saved one of those cards, but I wasn't there the night she buried them at the bottom of the garbage can. It was after Ben left, and after I discovered she'd lied to me about my father. It was when the trouble with Holly Kramer was just beginning, and I still thought -- like most of the town -- that her talent was undeniable. Some people even claimed she had to be psychic. After all, no one else knew that Rose was in trouble except Mary Beth; no one even suspected that Rose would take Clyde's car on that sun-blind Saturday morning and drive it right over the sidewalk and through the glass wall of his News and Tobacco Mart except my sister, who told Rose two months before that she'd better stop seeing Clyde. From the song chart, Mary Beth knew Clyde had to be bad news. She shook her head when Rose got stuck on "Lucille" for five weeks and warned her a