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'Leeann is the perfect narrator for this engaging and bittersweet story of compassion, forgiveness, and the search for redemption. This is a wonderful first novel.'
She can hear the music in peoples' souls.
Mary Beth and her younger sister Leeann are trying to support themselves in their small Southern hometown. So Mary Beth works to make ends meet by practicing her own unique talent: "song reading." By making sense of the song lyrics people have stuck in their heads, Mary Beth can help people make sense of their lives. In no time, Mary Beth's readings have the entire town singing her praises, including the handsome scientist Ben, who falls hard for Mary Beth and her unearthly intuition.
What happens when she can't make out the lyrics?
When Mary Beth reveals a long-muted secret in the community, however, she turns off the music and gives up song reading for good. Soon everyone's lives are out of tune: Leeann worries she'll never graduate from high school, and Ben can't conduct his experiments. Without Mary Beth's music the town's silence is louder than ever. Could it be that all the lyrics to all those foolish love songs really aren't so foolish after all?
Chapter One
My 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 ...
John Dufresne - author of Louisiana Power & Light
Tucker turns an engaging premise into a fascinating novel ... could well end up to be one of the summer's hot beach reads. Kevin McIlvoy
A novel of remarkable wisdom and tenderness ... Every splendid page inspires courage. Margot Livesey - author of Eva Moves the Furniture
In this sparkling debut, Tucker takes a fascinating premise—the possibility of reading the future through songs—and uses it to tell the absorbing story ...a delightful and engrossing novel. Silas House - author of A Parchment of Leaves
... this is a stunning debut by a major new voice for her generation.
If you liked The Song Reader, try these:
The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God
by Timothy Schaffert
Published 2005
A blithe and redemptive seriocomic love story filled with country music, the ghosts of Halloween, and an ironic brand of down-home religion.
by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Published 2005
In lush and elegant prose, Divakaruni has crafted a vivid and enduring dream, one that reveals hidden truths about the world we live in, and from which readers will be reluctant to wake.
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The Very Long, Very Strange Life of Isaac Dahl
by Bart Yates
A saga spanning 12 significant days across nearly 100 years in the life of a single man.
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Smothermoss by Alisa Alering
A haunting, imaginative, and twisting tale of two sisters and the menacing, unexplained forces that threaten them and their rural mountain community.