The Map of True Places

A Map of True Places sometimes sparkles with wit, sometimes takes on an elegaic tone. It is at once the fast-paced story of a young woman's life and the slow-paced story of a father's decline, showing the relativity of time. All things are in flux in Barry's novel: time, love, relationships, the very nature of the self and of one's desires.

Zee, a young psychologist, finds herself suddenly estranged from her fiance and in the position of caretaker to her father, rapidly in decline with Parkinson's Disease. Her bipolar mother committed suicide many years ago under hazy circumstances, a circumstance that haunts Zee still and arguably influced her decision to go into psychotherapy. A patient of hers, also bipolar and in the midst of a show more destructive relationship, has recently committed suicide herself, plaguing Zee with doubt about her competency in her chosen profession. It is against the background of all this turmoil that she returns to her hometown to care for her rapidly declining father, whose lover of many years he has just kicked out for reasons unknown to Zee (and to the reader).

The plot is densely woven and full of secrets, which come unraveled rapidly at the novel's conclusion: there is no slow revelation of facts. All is mystery up until the end. Until then, Barry sticks with psychological probing an examining characters, principally Zee, from all sides, examing each facet. If there is a flaw, it is that we see all characters only through the eyes of Zee, never getting a chance to delve into the psyches of other characters, except for brief glimpses into the minds of Hawk and Anne (the latter being a supporting character at best). Some characters-- and I'm thinking principally of Melville, the father, Finch's, lover-- would have been well-served to have moments of reflection to themselves.

All in all, a strong novel with a sympathetic heroine. Some suspension of disbelief is required re: her time away from work and "real life;" it is hard to believe that someone can step away from the demands of the everyday for such a long period of introspection, surely a luxury few of us can afford. But the characterizations are strong, and the plotting draws you in. As densely psychological as it is, it's still suspenseful. You won't be able to put it down until the last page is read and the last secret is revealed, the final dilemna resolved-- as much resolution as this novel allows. show less

I was not expecting to enjoy this book, and ended up appreciating it quite a bit. It deals with a young psychotherapist dealing with some heavy skeletons in her closet. It's a helluva closet-cleaning and we are taken along for the ride. Brunonia Barry drew me in slowly at first - I think I was hesitant because it hist close to home in a few places. I'm glad I stuck, though, because it was good to see Zee get her life straightened out, and to see that not all satisfying endings are happy ones. Despite that comment, this ends with a truly upbeat and hopeful note.

But for its occasionally desperate need of a more scrupulous editor, I enjoyed this story of a therapist returning home to Salem to care for her aging father and reflect on her life. Salem itself seems to be a character and the story is interwoven with its history and myth. There are a lot of threads to the story that Barry pulls together in a satisfying way as long as you manage to muscle your way through the odd redundancy of the book‘s middle.

Summary: Zee is a young woman whose life has always been defined by someone else. When she was a teenager, her increasingly unstable mother committed suicide, leaving Zee and her gay father to cope with the aftermath. Now, Zee is a therapist working in Boston, engaged to a handsome young man, and generally thinks of herself as well-adjusted. However, when one of Zee's patients - a woman named Lilly who has some disquieting similarities to Zee's mother - also commits suicide, it throws Zee into somewhat of a tailspin. She abandons her life in Boston and returns to the family home in Salem, ostensibly to help care for her father, who is suffering from rapidly-worsening Parkinson's. But, in order to successfully choose her future, Zee must show more first look back at the choices that she has made - and that have been made for her - in her past.

Review: Brunonia Barry has done it again. The Map of True Places is a worthy successor to The Lace Reader, and fans of one are sure to like the other. All of the things I liked most about The Lace Reader - the expert characterization, the incredibly fine layering of themes and metaphors, the excellent evocation of setting, and the twists that make you want to immediately start re-reading from the beginning as soon as you close the book - all of these are present and accounted for in The Map of True Places. None of the Big Twists/Huge Unspeakably Bad Secrets are as Unspeakably Bad and Twisty as those from The Lace Reader, but I also didn't see them coming ahead of time, and they absolutely surprised me enough to keep me reading well past when I had meant to put my book down and go make dinner.

Most of the time, Barry's got a real ear for tone, and her depictions of characters and situations are frequently so detailed and true-to-life that they can be almost uncomfortable to read. For all of her finely-crafted layering of story, though, I thought the navigation metaphors were a little bit overworked, especially compared to how subtle she was about weaving in the rest of her themes. I also thought the plotting was a smidge uneven as well; the book's a little meandering, which I didn't mind - Zee was an interesting character to spend time with, even when not much was happening - but then the ending felt like it happened too quickly, and a little bit too neatly. Although I appreciate the effort it must have taken to have all of the various pieces fall together they way they did, I do wish things had been left just a tiny bit more ambiguous.

Although this book and The Lace Reader are not directly connected, and one is not required reading for the other, fans will be pleased to know that they are set in the same version of Salem. I was happy to see Anne Chase show up again with a few POV chapters of her own, Rafferty makes a brief cameo, and even Towner gets a name-check, which made me grin. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: Fans of The Lace Reader will obviously want to pick up this one as well; it's just as good. If you haven't read Barry's first book, but like intelligent, multi-layered, character-driven fiction with an excellent sense of place and a sizeable dollop of family mystery, then you'll probably get along with The Map of True Places just fine. show less

Mystic sea ports.

Hawthorne.

Witches.

Civil Liberties.

Honestly, what is there not to love about Salem, MA?

For Zee Finch, there’s more to add under the “not” column. A fading father, a memory of a mother gone, a harbor town that simply holds too many reminders of a less than stellar youth.

So, it is with heavy baggage and much regret that she finds herself dislodged from far away Boston and set on a rip current back to her homeland. It is the ghost of family past coupled with a much more recent case gone horribly wrong that upends her beautiful engagement and career in the big city where her star is rising as an up and coming clinical psychotherapist.

Parkinson’s has settled in with her father, resulting in the disintegration of his show more longtime relationship with dear friend and lover, Melville. Distraught and dragged down by the sudden need for her character change from distant daughter to constant caregiver, Zee’s entire world is upended and sent straight back to a fun-house version of her youth. She is forced to come face to face with the psychology and mythology of her past, the town’s past and the much more recent past of her troubled client.

The silver lining to the dark storm cloud, is a mysterious man working on one of the ships in the port. Sunny and carefree in the way only old world sailors can be, Hawk is the picture of everything Zee has ever needed, capable of teaching her not only to read the stars but also to follow her heart. Of course, every storm cloud’s silver lining eventually sees another rainy day and not all parties are what they initially appear to be.

Barry’s book came to me this past summer and it’s taken me entirely too long to read it. I’m kicking myself, now, for leaving it for so long. Of course, sometimes books have a way of waiting for the best time to be read. October, Salem or Atlanta, tends to be a great time for curling up with a good book. Of course, adding the mystery of an old sea yarn, never hurt a good Autumn-in-New-England read either.(Try turning on some Barefoot Truth or Great Big Sea while you’re reading and I promise you won’t be disappointed.)

Growing up very close to Salem, hoping that every Neo-Crucible or Deliverance Dane anecdote will capture the town’s true awesomeness, I’m always disappointed.

Until now.

Barry gets it and here’s why: She tells stories like a New Englander. She writes about town drama and the colors of houses on the wharf, not, as southerners and midwesterners do, for poetic effect, but because these things have significance to ten generations looking back and it’s just a matter of fact. A north shore boatman retells a story because people have to know that “this happened” or because they should know “what went on here” as opposed to someone chatting about meandering minutia, whiling away of the hours in a hot southern sun, under parasols, drinking sweet tea.

In True Places, Barry tells a sea story and a T-story, weaving past and present with a classic Yankee attention to “only the good stuff”. I’m about halfway into her first book, The Lace Reader, and can attest to the same being said through both works. This storyteller gets two very enthusiastic thumbs up from a fairly-hard to please northerner. show less

“It’s not down on any map; true places never are.”
-- Herman Melville

Apparently, I was the only person in America not raving about The Lace Reader last year. I didn’t hate it, but I had a really hard time relating to the female protagonist, Towner Whitney. Having been curious enough to have read Ms. Barry’s second novel, The Map of True Places, again I find myself in the disenchanted minority—and with the exact same complaint!

Brunonia Barry’s new stand alone novel is set in the same world—the same Salem—as her first. Characters from The Lace Reader are referenced or make brief appearances. However, this novel is more grounded in the real world of psychology and medicine than with the ethereal subjects she had explored show more previously. The central character is Hepzibah Finch, known as “Zee.” (And what is it with these names, Brunonia?).

Zee is a psychologist in crisis. She’s just lost her first patient, and is having a hard time accepting that Lilly Braedon committed suicide. Zee’s own mother had killed herself when Zee was a teen, and feelings about the two women have become entangled in a very non-clinical way. Meanwhile, other areas of Zee’s life are falling apart. Her father’s Parkinson’s disease is far more advanced than she had been led to believe. She suddenly needs to step in as a care-taker, putting additional strain on an already strained relationship.

My frustration with this central character exists on several levels, but here is one issue I can illustrate easily enough. Allow me to share some quotes from the novel. All of these are spoken by, or refer to, Zee:

“I don’t know what I want.”
“The truth was, she didn’t know if she didn’t want to get married at all, or if she just hated the process.”
“She was angry at Michael, though she had no real reason for this except that he so clearly knew what he wanted in all areas of his life, while she couldn’t seem to make as simple a choice as whether or not to serve sushi at the wedding.”
“Zee had once known exactly what kind of life she wanted. Now she drew a complete blank.”
“I don’t know what I feel.”
“He had never asked her what she wanted out of life… These days she had to admit she had no idea.”
“Though she was still having doubts about her choice of career, Zee knew she had to get back to work.”
“I don’t know what I want either.”
“I don’t think what I was or was not ready for was clear in any way, least of all to me.”
“More than a few of the tears were relief; because… she had no big decisions to make.”
“She honestly couldn’t remember the last time she’d ordered ice cream for herself. It was ridiculous to be flustered by such a small thing, but there it was. He was waiting for her choice and she didn’t have one.”

I’m a highly empathetic reader, but I found Zee to be so bland, wishy-washy, and indecisive that I just wanted to slap her. I find it hard to become engaged in a character that passive. I pulled a whole other list of quotes that show the character to be tongue-tied and inarticulate, but given the length of this review, I’ll spare you. My point was that as a reader, all I have are the character’s words and thoughts to go by, and either Zee or Brunonia just wouldn’t spit them out.

I can see that Ms. Barry’s work resonates with the majority of her readers. That I am not among their number is unfortunate for me. But henceforth I will try to ignore my curiosity and Brunonia and I will go our separate ways and we will both be happier for it. show less

Brunonia Barry of ‘The Lace Reader’ fame returns with a new fiction offering set in Salem, ‘The Map of True Places.’ And it fittingly begins with the famous Melville quote: “It is not down in any map; true places never are.”

This is a novel of true places and those who seek them.

Psychologist Zee Finch returns to Salem to care for her ailing father, who is in the latter stages of Parkinson’s. Her life in Boston hasn’t been going well; her fiancé has broken their engagement and she has lost a patient to suicide. Zee is indeed in need of a map, but before she can plan a future she must understand her own past and explore her psychologist's theory that daughters live out their mothers' unfulled dreams. This proves to be a show more complex yet rewarding journey for both Zee and the reader.

Barry handles the various threads of the novel quite ably. Zee’s father, Finch, and his lover Melville, Finch’s healthcare provider Jessina, Maureen, Zee’s story teller mother, and Hawk, her new romantic interest, are each complex and well-developed characters who ring true. What was the relationship between Finch, Maureen, and Melville? Each character seems to view it differently. Did Lilly, Zee’s patient, actually commit suicide? How is Zee to find her way through the differing perspectives each character offers? As Finch loses his memory to dementia and Hawk teaches her celestial navigation, Zee must chart a path of her own through the past.

Barry’s novel is addictive reading. It is at once entertaining and thought provoking. show less