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The Diviner's Tale [Hardcover]

Bradford Morrow
3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (51 customer reviews)

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Book Description

January 20, 2011
Cassandra Brooks is a single mother-of-two, a schoolteacher and a water diviner. Deep in the woods as she dowses the land for a property developer, she is lost in her thoughts, until something catches her eye and her daydream shatters. Swinging from a tree is the body of a young girl, hanged. But when she returns with the authorities, the body has vanished. Already regarded as the local eccentric, her story is disbelieved � until a girl turns up in the woods, alive, mute and identical to the girl in Cassandra's vision. In the days that follow, Cassandra's visions become darker and more frequent as they begin to take on tangible form. Forced to confront a past she has tried to forget, Cassandra finds herself locked in a game of cat-and-mouse with a real life killer who has haunted her for longer than she can remember. This spellbinding concoction of suspense, romance and the supernatural will pull you helplessly down into Cassandra�s luminous world.
--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

An Otto Penzler Book

Walking a lonely forested valley on a spring morning in upstate New York, having been hired by a developer to dowse the land, Cassandra Brooks comes upon the shocking vision of a young girl hanged from a tree. When she returns with authorities to the site, the body has vanished, leaving in question Cassandra’s credibility if not her sanity. The next day, on a return visit with the sheriff to have another look, a dazed, mute missing girl emerges from the woods, alive and the very picture of Cassandra’s hanged girl.

What follows is the narrative of ever-deepening and increasingly bizarre divinations that will lead this gifted young woman, the struggling single mother of twin boys, hurtling toward a past she’d long since thought was behind her. The Diviner’s Tale is at once a journey of self-discovery and an unorthodox murder mystery, a tale of the fantastic and a family chronicle told by an otherwise ordinary woman.

When Cassandra’s dark forebodings take on tangible form, she is forced to confront a life spiraling out of control. And soon she is locked in a mortal chess match with a real-life killer who has haunted her since before she can remember.

Q&A with Bradford Morrow

Q: Do you consider yourself a diviner?

Morrow: I consider myself at best an amateur dowser. But I can say with certainty I no longer consider myself a doubter. Everyone is in his or her own way a diviner. And that's what the novel is in part about. Certainly being a writer demands that one engage in a form of divination, but that's true of so many creative activities in people's lives.

Q: The Diviner's Tale seamlessly brings together themes such as religion, philosophy, Greek mythology, baseball and bird-watching, and also creates a mash-up of literary fiction, mystery, and fantasy. How were you able to bring all those ideas and elements together so flawlessly?

Morrow: That's such a nice question I hate to ruin it with an answer. In fact, I've never really viewed the so-called genres of fantasy and mystery as being, by definition, distinct from the "literary." I've read any number of fantasy and mystery works I think of as highly literary. I'm keenly aware that one of the old cardinal rules of mystery is that it doesn't mix with the supernatural. P. D. James mentions this in her recent Talking About Detective Fiction: "All supernatural agencies are ruled out." But the world into which I was drawn with this book—Cassandra Brooks's world—defied such conventions, and so did I.

Q: Speaking of politics, The Diviner's Tale seems distinctly different from your other novels in that there's no overt political or historical dimension at its center.

Morrow: I think earlier novels like Giovanni's Gift and Trinity Fields examined the deeply political nature of family relationships. The Diviner's Tale is, in many ways, about what it's like to be a true outsider, gifted in ways the culture finds unacceptable or even bogus, trying to negotiate a path through the "real" world, the supposedly sane world. So the politics in this book are more familial and local. More about how some people considered freakish by society are often our most incandescent, brilliant members.

Q: Dowsing, or divining, is rich with metaphor. You play with ideas of the seen and the unseen, and with literary writing within the mystery. Are there hidden literary references in the book?

Morrow: You're right, divining is one of the richest metaphors I've ever worked with, even though much of the divination in the novel isn't metaphoric at all, but the real deal. I always love weaving hidden allusions in my novels. Beyond the obvious reference to the Cassandra myth, though, I think it's best to leave it to readers to do their own divining.



Bradford Morrow on What Inspired The Diviner's Tale

The Diviner's Tale arose from very humble circumstances. My farmhouse basement in rural New York always flooded when it rained even mildly for a day or two. An excavator friend suggested I hire a “water witch” to try to figure out what was going on underground. Skeptical, I agreed. So when Jimmy showed up with an older gentleman who matter of factly got a Y-rod out of his truck and began walking a zigzag across the yard above the house, I watched, expecting nothing. Skepticism turned to fascination, though, as I saw the tip of his rod jump downward with explosive quickness impossible to fake, and fascination turned to a kind of faith, when Jimmy's men excavated to the dowser's precise directions and found the stream where he said it would be. My flooding problem was soon resolved.

When I started writing the novel, a decade after this encounter, I realized I myself needed to learn the fundamentals of divining if I didn't want to make any serious errors in my portrayal of this complex, gentle, ineffable craft. As it happened, the American Society of Dowsers were holding their convention in Vermont that June, so I enrolled in basic dowsing school. Later, I felt a huge sense of relief when, on reading the galleys of The Diviner's Tale, my teacher, Marty Cain, one of the country's most prominent dowsers, wrote telling me I'd truly captured the craft and experience of divining.

My publisher, when designing the marvelous, haunting dust jacket, asked if I'd object if they put “A Mystery” on the cover instead of “A Novel.” Given that my editor, Otto Penzler, is probably the world's foremost editor of mystery fiction, I didn't think it an unfair request. But I felt, and feel, that The Diviner's Tale is more than a mystery, or at least very different from your conventional mystery novel, and decidedly not a whodunit. When nearing the end of the first draft, I toyed with the idea of Cass's nemesis being someone unexpected, someone other than who he had to be, but then realized such a move would be just that--a move, a trick, ultimately a betrayal of my narrator's quest. The mystery was there for Cassandra Brooks to resolve. What drove the book for me was the need to accompany her on her journey from crisis to illumination, whether that meant drawing on elements of suspense, fantasy, or the supernatural. As a reader, I myself gravitate toward fiction that is free of certain genre-driven restrictions. That The Diviner's Tale turned out to be a dark novel, owing much to the Gothic, didn't surprise me, as that seems to be one of my wellsprings. But that I was creating something of a genre mash-up didn't enter my mind. Rather, I tried as hard as I could to stay true to Cass and family, and her rural communities of Corinth County and Covey Island.

Novels, at least my novels, come less from witnessing or thinking something I feel I can explain, than things I can't. By writing The Diviner's Tale, I narrated my way as close as I could toward an understanding of what I saw that day when the dowser visited my house, and solved an everyday problem by means of a gift one doesn't often witness. He planted the seed of this book by simply going about his business. I've now come to think we're all diviners, finally, in our different ways. We only need to know how easy it is to look around unturned corners to see things up ahead that might otherwise go unnoticed.

From Publishers Weekly

Cassandra Brooks, who lives in rural upstate New York with her twin sons, ekes out a living substitute teaching and dowsing, or divining, in Morrow's solid gothic-infused tale of family secrets. As a child, Cassandra discovered she possessed the gift to divine water and have "forevisions" of the future, including one the night her beloved older brother, Christopher, was killed. While on a divining job for a new property development, Cassandra sees the body of a teenage girl hanging from a tree, but when she returns with the police, there's no trace of the body. Cassandra wonders what her vision means, especially after a runaway girl, Laura Bryant, surfaces and claims she was kidnapped. Even though the vision dredges up bittersweet memories of Christopher, Cassandra is determined to help Laura, who's in real danger. Morrow (Ariel's Crossing) beautifully evokes Cassandra's inner turmoil, but those expecting a conventional whodunit may be disappointed. (Jan.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 320 pages
  • Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; First Edition edition (January 20, 2011)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0547382634
  • ISBN-13: 978-0547382630
  • Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (51 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #946,386 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Bradford Morrow has lived for the past thirty years in New York City and rural upstate New York, though he grew up in Colorado and lived and worked in a variety of places in between. While in his mid-teens, he traveled through rural Honduras as a member of the Amigos de las Americas program, serving as a medical volunteer in the summer of 1967. The following year he was awarded an American Field Service scholarship to finish his last year of high school as a foreign exchange student at a Liceo Scientifico in Cuneo, Italy. In 1973, he took time off from studying at the University of Colorado to live in Paris for a year. After doing graduate work on a Danforth Fellowship at Yale University, he moved to Santa Barbara, California, where he worked as a bookseller until relocating to New York City in 1981, where he began editing the literary journal "Conjunctions" and writing novels.

His first five novels--"Come Sunday" (1988), "The Almanac Branch" (1992, PEN/Faulkner Award finalist), "Trinity Fields" (Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, 1995), "Giovanni's Gift" (1997) and "Ariel's Crossing" (2002)--are all available as e-books from Open Road Media from January 25, 2011.

In collaboration with eighteen artists, Morrow is the author of "A Bestiary," as well as a book for children, "Didn't Didn't Do It," illustrated by the legendary Gahan Wilson. Morrow has also edited and written a number of other books, including "Posthumes" (poetry), "The New Gothic" (with Patrick McGrath) and "The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth" (with Sam Hamill) and has contributed to many anthologies and journals. As founding editor of "Conjunctions," he has edited over 55 volumes of the journal from 1981 to the present. An anthology on death, "The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death," co-edited with David Shields, will be published by W.W. Norton in February 2011.

His new novel, "The Diviner's Tale," is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the U.S. and in England with Corvus (Atlantic), as well as an audiobook with Blackstone. His first collection of short stories, "Lush," will be published in Fall 2011 by Pegasus Books. He is completing work on his seventh novel, "The Prague Sonata," as well as a book of creative nonfiction works, "Meditations on a Shadow."

Morrow's many awards include an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, O. Henry and Pushcart Prizes, as well as the PEN/Nora Magid Award. He has taught at Princeton, Columbia, and Brown Universities and for the past twenty years has been a Bard Center Fellow and professor of literature at Bard College.

Visit his website at www.bradfordmorrow.com.

Customer Reviews

It is a ghost story, a supernatural tale, and a literary thriller. anthony r. bozza  |  12 reviewers made a similar statement
It seemed a very long read for not so long of a book. An Educated Consumer  |  8 reviewers made a similar statement
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
25 of 34 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars A magnificent novel, both engrossing and moving January 6, 2011
Format:Hardcover
I'm a huge fan of Bradford Morrow's and I've been waiting for this book, The Diviners Tale, for a long time. Not only is it worth the wait, it's one of the best contemporary novels I've read in years.

When the novel opens the narrator, Cassandra Brooks, describes her first "forevision," a premonition of her brother's death. It got me hooked right away and set up story lines which enrich the book throughout: Cassandra's strong yet complicated relationships with her family; the unique gifts that make her feel like an outsider; and the burdens that accompany her talent for divination (she foresees her brother's death but can't stop him from dying). Cassandra struggles to live a quiet life, raising twin sons as a single parent and forging bonds with her challenging mother and her ailing father, teaching, and "divining" -- a talent tied to her premonitory powers. Cassandra quickly became a character I adore, someone whose insecurities I can relate to as easily as I can to the capaciousness of her heart.

While divining (for water, a fascinating process Morrow describes so well) Cassandra sees a horrifying sight, a dead girl hanging from a tree in the woods. However, when she summons the police the girl has vanished without a trace. Did she imagine the whole thing? Was it the sign of a murder to come, or the residue of one that already happened? When a missing girl who resembles the dead girl (and reminds Cassandra of herself) is found, Cassandra is pulled even further into this frightening web. The tension builds slowly but masterfully; there are moments near the end that left me reading doubly fast because I couldn't bear to wait to find out what happened.

The whodunit is the least interesting aspect of The Diviner's Tale, and the easiest to figure out. That didn't bother me; there were enough twists and turns to keep me guessing. Besides, I was most interested in Cassandra's journey, the path by which she learned to accept her warts, powers of divination, and all, and finally to embrace her valiant life. Also, while I might have appreciated some insight into the motivations of the villain, Morrow's interest in fleshing out the good guys rather than the bad ones is a refreshing change. Usually, the villains are more interesting than the heroes! Here, the flawed but admirable individuals - and they are many - are the people you wind up wanting to know.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)
Billed as a gothic tale of suspense, Bradford Morrow's "The Diviner's Tale" probably won't satisfy the most stalwart of horror aficionados. Mysterious and creepy, to be sure, the primary plot and its resolution were actually the least compelling aspects of a rather unusual character study. For at its heart, that's what "The Diviner's Tale" is--an examination of one woman's life told in a sprawling first person narrative. Expository, sometimes disjointed, but always fascinating--I loved Morrow's cadence and prose. I was caught up in the language and the person of his heroine, Cassandra Brooks, and found her to be an intriguingly original protagonist. For me, therefore, "The Diviner's Tale" was a rich and rewarding story of Cassandra making peace with her life, her guilt, her family, and the distinct ability that helps to define her world.

Cassandra is a dowser and, at more than one pivotal moment in her life, has also experienced fore-visions of future events. It is an unwelcome talent that sits heavy with her and has helped to alienate her from much of the world through her years growing up. One morning in the woods, Cassandra discovers a girl hanging from a tree. Alerting the police to this grisly tableau, they return to find no evidence of the body. The next day, however, a mute and disheveled girl emerges from the woods with no explanation. Cassandra tries to piece the significance of this live presence against her vision together, and there seems to be an inexplicable link to her past. But as the truths from her childhood emerge, there might be some very real dangers at work in the present.

"The Diviner's Tale" does a nice job layering in Cassandra's childhood remembrances with the modern day narrative. These early glimpses of a young Cassandra help establish the woman we now know filled with guilt and recrimination. But, again, the mystery element of "The Diviner's Tale" is not what distinguishes the story. It is Cassandra. As Cassandra relates to a semi-distant mother, an ailing father, and her twin boys--Morrow paints a delicate portrait of a flawed family that perseveres despite adversity. I was wholly engaged with this aspect of the novel and thought that each of these characters was finely depicted. In fact, all of the characterizations were strong, and that made me want to see this tale through to the end.

The revelation of what happened to the girl and how it may be connected with Cassandra certainly treaded familiar territory. But throughout, I was captivated by Morrow's lovely prose. There was an eloquence to his phrasing and an almost lifelike flow to the wording. I really enjoyed "The Diviner's Tale" despite its shortcomings, and really recommend it as a different type of character study. I could think of worse ways to spend your time than to hang out with Cassandra and her brood. KGHarris, 12/10.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Subtly haunting, deftly poetic July 24, 2011
Format:Hardcover
The Diviner's Tale defies any easily definable genre, because it is a masterful hybrid of several. It is a ghost story, a supernatural tale, and a literary thriller. At its core it is the story of a single mother and her children overcoming their struggles, all growing together through periods of intense self-awakening. Bradford Morrow couches these changes and stories within a painterly background. His ability to make the natural rural setting of the book come alive is remarkable. Descriptions of birds and plants come alive on these pages, where in another writer's hands they would fall flat. It's a testament to his skill as a storyteller. This book is an engaging journey, one that takes the reader down the rabbit hole along with his characters, and he does so without tricks. It's all so organic and cohesive that the reader becomes a diviner as well, following the threads of story, uncovering the themes instinctually as the various mysteries reveal themselves. It's a worthwhile path to follow.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars Intriguing story that meanders too much and falls short
This book has a nice opening and overall promising premise, but the plot sort of meanders all over the place. Read more
Published 1 month ago by CL
1.0 out of 5 stars Most Boring Book (at least on audio)
Oh, gosh. This book could have been a lot shorter. If Morrow would have cut out all the frivolous yap. It was not beneficial to the story. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Tammy Anderson
5.0 out of 5 stars gorgeous prose engrossing storyline
I have never read Bradford Morrow before. I picked it up in a coffee shop intending just to read a bit and sip, then entranced ,begged it off the barista who let me have it on... Read more
Published 2 months ago by chance
3.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful Idea Not Fully Executed
I really wanted to love this book and I debated giving it 4 stars instead of 3. That being said, I never really felt like I connected with the main character. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Evelyn Marsdale
4.0 out of 5 stars Not a Thriller-- Beautifully Written Though
My score is 3.5 but I rounded it up to 4 because reading literate fiction does not harm anyone. In fact, I should have known what to expect when I saw it had blurbs from Peter... Read more
Published 13 months ago by Sires
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful prose
Within minutes of beginning The Diviner's Tale, I was caught in the mental images and beautiful language. The story unfolded and I couldn't put the book down. Read more
Published 19 months ago by mainemom
2.0 out of 5 stars A very mixed bag
The author displays a first-class talent for wordsmithing--breathtakingly vivid, creative descriptions of settings and actions in particular. Read more
Published 20 months ago by WiseWoman
4.0 out of 5 stars beautiful writing
I finished this book and had to "sit with it" for a while. The writing is excellent and I found the touches of supernatural to be quite believable. Read more
Published 21 months ago by A. Adams
5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning
Cassandra is among the most captivating voices in recent American fiction. This is a mystery in the very best sense, a mystery about the nature of human life and memory itself. Read more
Published 23 months ago by Max Kaplan
2.0 out of 5 stars Just not captivating
The first chapter is excellent, and then it starts meandering off course.

When I first read the jacket for the Diviner's Tale, I was sure this was the book for me. Read more
Published on May 19, 2011 by Robert D. Watson
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