Search - The Lace Reader

Towner Whitney is forced to return to Salem MA, after an absence of almost 15 years, when her Great-Aunt Eva goes missing. Once she is back in Salem Towner soon finds out that she will need to confront the ghosts of her past in order to move on into her future. Through a series of flashbacks and memories the reader finds out that the Whitney family is not quite what they seem. The story is filled with a cast of eccentric characters from Towner's mother May who refuses to step a foot off the island she lives on, to her uncle Calvin who has been saved and has started his own religious cult at a local campground, to a collection of witches who seem to have gravitated to Salem because of it's historical past.
The writing in this story is excellent and there were many features that made this book appeal to me. Each chapter is prefaced with a quote from The Lace Reader's Guide by Eva Whitney which is a convention I found appealing in itself. However, these little excerpts do more than just introduce the tone of each chapter, They end up providing important foreshadowing of what is to come later in the book. Meanwhile, the true story of Towner's family is revealed to the reader slowly, memory by painful memory, as Towner actually draws her past back to her consciousness out from the mental "lock-box" where she has stored all her Salem memories away. Then, one final twist at the very end of the story makes the reader to want to go back and start the story all over again, re-reading it with the new eyes.
This is a great book that will keep you guessing throughout.

I did not care for this book. The story seemed disjointed to me. At one point, the main character stated that she was crazy. That's what I felt about the whole book. It just never grabbed ny attention. The author seemed to jump from one thing to another with no real flow. I could not finish it. I read about 140-150 pages to give it a fair shot. It just never went 'bang'.

The Lace Reader is not Great Literature (thank god), but I did enjoy it very much. It's a little more thriller-y than my usual thing, however it's not exactly a thriller either. I did not see that *particular* big twist at the end coming though there were more minor plot twists I did anticipate, which was fine. I'd been through a string of unsatisfactory books recently and this ended it. In short, my reading palate has been satisfactorily cleansed by this book. It is not as sorbet-y as that metaphor might lead one to believe--it's got more gravitas than a sorbet--but it was certainly refreshing. I'd recommend it as a good summer beach read but with more heft than that might might ordinarily imply. It's not a potato chip read, more like pita chips and hummous. Snacky, tasty, but not unhealthy or empty calories.

Now that I think about it, it kind of reminds me of The Time Traveler's Wife for reasons that I cannot quite pin down in my own mind. Partly it's that it is mainstream fiction with a little skid into the speculative/paranormal realm, not enough to scare the normals of course, just enough to make things more interesting. I am a sucker for a sympathetic but unreliable narrator, and Barry's book has that in spades. I predict good things for Ms. Barry if she can keep this up.

Finished this a little disappointed-twists at the end were little surprising.