The Lace Reader: A Novel
by Brunonia Barry
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Book Summary Information
Author: Brunonia BarryEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-08-01
ISBN: 0061624764
Number of pages: 400
Publisher: William Morrow
Book Reviews of The Lace Reader: A Novel
Book Review: What happened to The Lace Reader?
Summary: 3 Stars
Like many reviewers, I thought The Lace Reader showed great promise but was ultimately disappointing. In the beginning, I settled into a haunting story about Salem witches, psychics, and readers who saw visions in the patterns of lace. I became a friend of Sophya, the lead character who returns home to bury the aunt who raised her. The sea, the islands, the dogs, the tea, the mystics, the calvinists...Brunonia Barry reeled the reader in with great mystery and intrigue. Then something went wrong.
Sophya, called Towner, obsesses over her twin sister who committed suicide. She begins to date Rafferty, the local cop. Rafferty is caught up in the case of a missing girl feared dead. Sophya is haunted by her past love and by her abusive father who leads the crazy religious locals. The middle of the book pulls the reader in a million directions with no hope in sight. Sophya's real mother remains a distant figure and the reader forgets all about Eva, the dead aunt.
A big section of the book is Sophya's childhood, packed full of random days that should have been laced throughout the book rather than all packed into about 30 pages. The author also switches between first person narrative when Sophya was telling the story, and third person narrative when we were looking at Rafferty's actions. While this style is okay, it ultimately made the story disjointed and made it hard for the characters to actually connect.
I wouldn't call it a "sixth sense" type ending like many other reviewers have mentioned, but it's sad that the A-ha! moment happened in the last twenty pages of the book. I indeed felt cheated and felt like I'd wasted too much time and too many pages building up to the lackluster climax.
I really wanted to love this book. If only I could read lace...it would probably tell me not to waste my time on this one.
Summary of The Lace Reader: A Novel
Every gift has a price . . .
Every piece of lace has a secret . . .
My name is Towner Whitney. No, that's not exactly true. My real first name is Sophya. Never believe me. I lie all the time. . . .
Towner Whitney, the self-confessed unreliable narrator of The Lace Reader, hails from a family of Salem women who can read the future in the patterns in lace, and who have guarded a history of secrets going back generations, but the disappearance of two women brings Towner home to Salem and the truth about the death of her twin sister to light.
The Lace Reader is a mesmerizing tale that spirals into a world of secrets, confused identities, lies, and half-truths in which the reader quickly finds it's nearly impossible to separate fact from fiction, but as Towner Whitney points out early on in the novel, "There are no accidents."
Amazon Best of the Month, August 2008: Brunonia Barry dreamt she saw a prophecy in a piece of lace, a vision so potent she spun it into a novel. The Lace Reader retains the strange magic of a vivid dream, though Barry's portrayal of modern-day Salem, Massachusetts--with its fascinating cast of eccentrics--is reportedly spot-on. Some of its stranger residents include generations of Whitney women, with a gift for seeing the future in the lace they make. Towner Whitney, back to Salem from self-imposed exile on the West Coast, has plans for recuperation that evaporate with her great-aunt Eva's mysterious drowning. Fighting fear from a traumatic adolescence she can barely remember, Towner digs in for answers. But questions compound with the disappearance of a young woman under the thrall of a local fire-and-brimstone preacher, whose history of violence against Whitney women makes the situation personal for Towner. Her role in cop John Rafferty's investigation sparks a tentative romance. And as they scramble to avert disaster, the past that had slipped through the gaps in Towner's memory explodes into the present with a violence that capsizes her concept of truth. Readers will look back at the story in a new light, picking out the clues in this complex, lovely piece of work. --Mari Malcolm
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