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Author: Brunonia Barry $16.47 |
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Editorial Review:
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
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 3.5 / 5.0 
A novel that will be hard to forget: 
Reviewed by Sandie Kirkland for RebeccasReads (12/08)
Salem, Massachusetts is the home of the Whitney family. Whitney women are known for their strength, their eccentricity and their ability to read the future in lace. There is Eva, the matriarch, who lives in Salem, reads lace and runs a tearoom. May, her stepdaughter, is an agrophobic who lives on an island in the harbour, where she has devoted her life to helping battered women, many of whom live there while putting their lives back together. Emma,...more info
Not a good read...at all.: 
I read this book because my mother-in-law said it had been on the NYT bestseller list. I haven't checked this, but that really surprised me once I read the book.
First, the author spends an inordinate amount of time discussing Salem, which gets to be very old after awhile. We get that the author's living in Salem. There is no point in describing every single street corner. The geography and her (bad) descriptions of the setting dominate the novel.
Then, the main character is horribly drawn up. All...more info
blah, then good, then, huh?: 
I just finished this book and figured now would be the time to comment. I had trouble committing to the characters and style in the beginning, finding the book alarmingly reminiscent of overly theatrical historical fiction with hints of the romance genre thrown in. Then, something changed; it suddenly became more sophisticated, and multilayered, and I was encouraged enough to read til the end, at which point the whole damn thing just crashed and burned. Previous reviewers have alluded to this, and I won't...more info
It made me sad that it was not what I expected; but it was good:
The lacking part of this book was my projection of what the book was about and the lack of lace reading incite, materials, etc really put me off. It is a good story, just not my kinda' story, and very well written with wonderful characters. Local detail was great. My disappointment was my preconceived preception.
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