Customer Reviews

The Lace Reader: A Novel

5 star:		(70)
4 star:		(83)
3 star:		(39)
2 star:		(42)
1 star:		(20)

 

 

... because what to say about this brilliant book without surrendering its secrets? Other readers compare it to The Sixth Sense, and I can't disagree. This is a novel that, once finished, compels you to go back and start again. And once the end has stripped you of your original assumptions, the truth behind Towner's slant on earlier scenes springs out so that you wonder how you missed it. However, while the end is the most obvious conversation point of the book, it has merit beyond its final twist.

At first, Towner seems slightly flat and slow to develop, but by the end, a look back to understand the "whole" Towner reveals her depth. She and Rafferty are memorable and sympathetic (I did wish for more of Rafferty), but even secondary characters like Eva, May, Ann, and Jack are given the breath of realism. The setting is almost a character in itself, a living patchwork of place and time.

Those who call this book a "page-turner" seem to be labeling it from the perspective of having finished it. The swelling tension of the last hundred pages is difficult to put down, but the first hundred certainly do not skim past (they might more so the second time around as one scours for clues to the truth). This book creeps at first, wraps tendrils around its readers to pull us in and under, slowly builds our trust in Towner as narrator, even though she's told us from page one, "I lie all the time." By mid-book, we see the world through Towner's eyes and forget that she's warned us not to.

Brunonia Barry astutely writes Rafferty's voice more straightforward and less poetic than Towner's. The two chapters toward the end, which come from two secondary characters, jarred me a bit, but their perspectives are necessary to a full understanding of events. Normally a point-of-view pedant, I was able to forgive this in appreciation of the entire book.

Barry's style does fluctuate somewhat; she can write one paragraph of lovely or stunning imagery and the next of lackluster sentences like "He parked the car. He walked her to the door." At times, I felt as if I were reading a juxtaposition of Jodi Picoult and Ernest Hemingway. However, I'd be unfair not to note that I have the advance copy of this book, not the final edit. Some of the stilted paragraphs may well be re-worked by the time this book hits the shelves. If not, I still can't consider this a fatal flaw; the story is too good for that.

If you love a story constructed around point of view, if you love a story of broken people who find each other and don't give up on healing, if you love a story whose seemingly scrambled threads is really a perfect pattern ... if you love good literature, give your time to this book. It will reward you.

My mother, who is now 75, told me of reading a suggestion last year; specifically, how to decide whether to continue reading a book to the end. On the assumption that as one gets older, one has less time to waste, the suggestion was to subtract one's age from 100 and give that many pages for a book to "hook" you, the reader. Thus, by age 99, authors are given little margin for error. This one "hooked" me sufficiently to be read at age 82. And continued to hook me for the next 340-some-odd pages. As though taking blocks out of a bucket and carefully laying them together for a complex and exotic construction, Barry lays out clues and tidbits that tantalize the reader. After such careful construction building a masterful story, Barry simply upends the bucket and dumps the remaining blocks on the reader in an ending reminiscent of "The Sixth Sense". This plot twist comes too harshly, is too disjointed and confusing, and is ultimately disappointing.

The Whitney women can all read lace, but Towner Whitney doesn't want any part of it, and has left Salem Massachusetts and Yellow Dog Island to get away from all the bad memories of her childhood home and the lace readings. Living in L.A. she has no intention of returning.

The book starts when she receives a call from her brother telling her that her 80-something-year-old Great Aunt Eva is missing and she must return home. Towner is recovering from a surgical procedure and had been thinking of the gift that her Great Aunt Eva had recently sent to her. It was a lace-making pillow, used for making Ipswich lace. The lace making and the reading of lace had been a tradition of the Whitney women, and Towner was no exception. Although she wants no part of it anymore, she loves her aunt and feels she has to face her bad memories and go home. Salem and Yellow Dog Island are places filled with fearful bad memories.

Towner returns after being away for over 15 years and is immediately entrenched in all the troubles of the past. It is interesting to follow the writing of author Barry as she writes through the eyes of Towner, who sometimes lives in her dreams of the past. The story is kept fresh with trying to determine if what Towner is thinking is real, or the memories from childhood twisted over time.

Of course there is the love interest in Rafferty, the detective who is assigned to the case, as well as all the other quirky characters. Salem women who are Witches and selling their wares in the small shops on the square, and the women of Yellow Dog Island and their lace, making kept this book moving along nicely.

The Lace Reader is quite an interesting book. Brunonia Barry pulled me in right away with her way of including an excerpt from The Lace Readers Guide, at the beginning of each chapter. The Salem history, entwined with the story of Towner and the strange group of characters kept me glued to this book to the end.

Armchair Interviews says: Women, lace, and a missing older lady makeup an interesting read.

Far from the lace doilies that sit on the furniture and collect dust, this story lives like the lace wrapped around ones shoulders, collecting the secrets women whisper in each other's ears. Brunonia Barry is an artful weaver of woman's tales and their relationships with each other. While she speaks of magic in the lace and crafts of the spinners and witches in her story, the real magic lies in the power of woman supporting woman in the pivotal moments of their lives.

The point of view passes between Towner, the main character, and the narrator. Towner is a self described liar, and the narrator always tells the truth, you must pay careful attention to the words if you want to understand when and even if Towner knows she is lying. Set in Salem Massachusetts, Towner returns home for her Aunt Eve's funeral, and must learn to allow the lace to tell its story so she can finally see the truth of who she is and what she and the women in her family have survived by having each other. The lace reveals the future and unveils the past.

If you enjoyed `The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood', `The Lovely Bones', or `The Bluest Eyes', this novel is for you.

When I initially read the reviews of this book, I thought I had a real winner of a read here--old mystery, family drama, strong lead character, eccentric secondary characters, a hint of romance, all set in an historical city that just reeks of suspense. Then I read the book. Like that anticipation children experience before opening their Christmas gifts, this book left me sitting in my chair staring at the glowing reviews on the cover, thinking, "What?".

I know it's a bad sign when it takes me over a week to get into a book to the point where I desperately want to read it, to the exclusion of food. I finally decided to just keep plugging away until it was done. The writing is light & readable, the plot keeps you interested just long enough to be angry when all the action lurches suddenly into another odd angle, but I never got to the point where I really cared about any of the characters (initially I was intrigued by the missing great-aunt, but rapidly lost interest with all the trivial details about her and completely lost interest when the big "reason!" behind her disappearance was revealed). The lead character, Towner/Sophya is a whiny, self-indulgent, dork. Another sudden plot twist relating to her mental history from the perspective of her ex-high-school boyfriend and her family did not save her from the "loser" bin I had dumped her into. Rafferty, the lead detective on Great Aunt Eva's disappearance, was a terrible cop. No policeman I ever met could spend hours and hours and hours on a minor case that was supposedly solved, as well as attempting to romance the mentally-unstable heroine.

The tossed-in characters of Anna the Witch, Anya the future sister-in-law, Beezer the brother, and Rafferty's daughter just work to muddy the already obscure story. One minute Rafferty is trying to figure out why Tower/Sophya is the way she is, then he's off visiting a psychic witch who uses him to determine that another victim is dead, then the "dead" victim pops up out of nowhere, then Rafferty's taking Tower/Sophya out to dinner at a restaurant where her ex-high-school-boyfriend (who's involvement with her somehow led to his own mental demise, but we're never sure why)get into a fight with someone else, and so on, and so on.

This book is just such a mess of tangled plot devices, story twists, odd characters, and unlikable people that I only managed to finish it by trying to predict what weird and jerky plot twist would happen next. The fact that I finished it still surprises me. I was not happy to read a blurb on the last page in which the author gives us less-than-subtle hints about the upcoming sequel to this mushed-up mess. Needless to say, I will not be reading the sequel. Perhaps in a few years, when this author has had time to mature to the point where her stories are well-plotted and better written, I will attempt to read something by her again. There are hints of what could have been throughout the book, but hints do not make up a good novel.

You'll notice that over half the reviews from this book are from the Amazon Vine program, a program which gives top reviewers free products in an effort to better promote the product and ultimately sell more. These reviews are easy to spot, not just by their lime green promo lines, but by the garrulous and verbose language they are usually penned with (apparently this makes their writers feel more "official"), and more poignantly by the almost universally glowing favor they have for their counterpart product. I assume that these writers feel obligated to not only write a review so they can continue receiving more mediocre free stuff from Amazon, but to make that review overwhelmingly positive for the same reasons.

I, however, do not fall into this category.

When being invited to Vine program I was intrigued, and having once been a top reviewer and then stopping for a year or more, I was also wanting to get back into writing more reviews. This seemed like a good prodding in that direction.

The first thing I noticed upon joining the Vine program was the selection quality. I had never heard of any of the authors in the meager offerings, and moreover they looked like the kind of books that *needed* this kind of additional help to sell...in other words, they just looked boring. After a bit of deliberation, "The Lace Reader" was the only one that seemed worthy of a read, so I ended up with it.

Within the first two pages I knew what I had received: A book from a first-time novelist writing about an area that she's from, recounting all to familiar events in her life (the extremely overdone "write what you know" syndrome).

Something about this book that most reviewers fail to mention is that it is written in first-person present tense. In the hands of a great author, this is still a slippery medium to navigate, especially for the entirety of a novel. In the hands of Brunonia Barry? Awkward, clumsy and disjointed. This is a vehicle best suited for experimental short stories, not full-length novels for first-time writers. It's unfair of me to slay this book in such a way without some examples, so here you go.

Barry has the laziest verbs I've encountered in recent memory. As Stephen King says, "the road to hell is paved with adverbs" and The Lace Reader is littered with them. Furthermore, even for a first-person narrative, the book is just far too introspective. Her main character, Towner, chooses to simply tell us every suspicion that pops into her head, rather than show us why it did. She always says phrases "a bit too sharply", or perhaps, "a bit too loudly." One of the many "Writing the Breakthrough Novel!" books that undoubtedly litter this writer's workspace should've informed her that good writing is showing, not telling. I don't need to have the narrator tell me she said something too sharply, I need to see the character she's speaking to frown and slightly recoil, making the narrator wonder if it came out wrong. This sort of expertise is starkly absent, and as a result many readers (as several fellow reviewers have also lamented) will be unable to connect with the characters or the narrative, and have difficulty trudging through.

Don't be fooled by the high 4-star average rating of this book. The majority of those reviews came early on in the pre-release phase from the all too majestic digital pens of my fellow Vine members who I'm sure felt compelled to rave over this average offering to up their Vine brownie points, something which doesn't exist. I have no qualms about decimating this novel, freely offered to me or not. Maybe honest and yes, sometimes negative reviews will encourage Amazon to inject some quality products for us to actually review, not to simply rid their warehouses of overstocked books or pimp out novels from the highest paying publisher.

I was pretty excited to crack open this debut from new novelist Brunonia Barry, psyched about the creative concept behind the story as well as the Salem setting, but closed it feeling more disappointment and confusion than I can recall from any recent reading experience.

The very broken, damaged Towner Whitney (somehow also known as Sophya) has returned to Salem from years in California because her beloved great-aunt Eva has gone missing. That mystery is solved immediately - well, partially - upon Towner's return so it's not a focal point of the story, and the real mystery is Towner herself. The first would be why on earth the girl has two distinctly different names, but let's not belabor the point. No, the bigger mystery is what on earth is going on with this woman. From the flashes we're given it's clear that she's been hospitalized, most recently for a physical condition and in the more distant past, a murkier mental one. The story we're told is that she had a twin sister, Lyndley, from whom she was raised separately, who committed suicide years before. Their mother May lives like a hermit on one end of Yellow Dog Island, running a sort of underground railroad for domestic abuse victims, and May's sister Emma lives at the other end. It was Emma who raised Lyndley, having been given the child by her sister because she couldn't have any of her own. This turns out to be a tragic disaster, though, when Emma's lout of a husband, Cal, sexually abuses the girl. Worse, Cal is now a religious cult leader living nearby with his followers, and his tormenting of the Whitney family has never ended.

The Whitney women are Lace Readers, women with the gift to see prophecy through the patterns of lace. Supposedly, the author was inspired to write the novel by a dream she had about a vision read in lace, and it's an intriguing, incredibly creative idea. Amidst a beautiful, richly-illustrated setting, the story itself is dark with themes of insanity, sexual abuse and brutal domestic violence.

Sounds compelling, right? Well, it WOULD HAVE BEEN if not for the fact that at the end it COMPLETELY UNRAVELS! To my frustration I can't even say why, because it would be a spoiler. All I can say is that it goes off the deep end and not in a good way. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, and although she could have possibly found a way to bring it all together and at least attempt to explain away the utterly ridiculous turn the story took, she doesn't even bother. From reviews on Amazon it appears that some people liked it regardless (maybe they didn't actually finish it?), and others came to the same befuddled conclusion as I. All I did when I reached the end was scratch my head and think, "But how did......" "How could this have happened if she......." "She didn't explain what....." "Who was the person on the....." and finally, "THIS MAKES NO FREAKING SENSE!!!"

Hell, I'm not even one of those people who's a firm stickler for details, and I'll take style over substance if the style is stylish enough, so that's testament to just how ridiculous and confusing I found this. For me personally it qualifies as THE WORST ENDING EVER. Not the concept, which as I said could have been compelling if the author had bothered to really tie it together, answer all the glaring questions and numerous outright impossibilities, but she does not. I actually shook my head in disbelief when I got to the end and realized that she apparently had no intention of doing so. I'm not such an idiot that I need everything explained to me at the end, mind you, but when an author spends 400 or so pages weaving what turns out to be almost a complete fabrication....YEAH, I HAVE A FEW QUESTIONS!

How disappointing that a story with such wonderful potential ended up being almost a complete waste of time and money. Honestly, I was disgusted in a way I rarely am with books. I will never read anything by this author again.

THE LACE READER is one of the most heavily hyped books of the year, with HarperCollins paying Brunonia Barry a whopping $2.4 million for the rights to this novel and an untitled follow up. I wish I could say this debut lives up to the hype, but it really doesn't.

This novel isn't exactly bad, but it's structured in an awkward manner that makes it difficult to get into. Most notably, very little happens during the first 150 pages of THE LACE READER. A large number of characters are introduced, and their relationships and back stories are revealed in a plodding fashion. Eventually, a mystery plot is introduced, but it quickly takes a backseat to yet even more backstory that relates to the main character, Tower Whitney.

As another reviewer commented, THE LACE READER is filled with blind alleys -- a lot of scenes go nowhere, serving no purpose to the storyline. Barry is also very fond of frequently changing points of view from character to character, as well as jumping back and forth in time. There are also several scenes that may or may not be taking place in the real world. While all of this gives the book a Gothic, dreamlike quality, it also hinders the plot's momentum in a pretty severe fashion.

Everything else about the book is just average. The prose of this novel is acceptable, but in no way remarkable. The characterization approaches the level of caricature in places, especially when it comes to the religious conservatives in this book who serve as the primary villains. The ending is quite a surprise, but is ultimately little more than an unsatisfying gimmick.

Obviously, some people just adore this book, including the publisher that paid big money for it. But in the end, I found THE LACE READER a rather lackluster example of storytelling.

Brunonia Barry's impressive debut novel is not set in Kansas, but in Salem, MA, forever infamous as the home of witches and other "crazies". The site of the tragic trials in 1692 is like no other town in the US. Setting her story of a mentally unbalanced young woman in Salem was a brilliant choice, because its foggy, mystical elements are more easily accepted against that most eccentric of backgrounds.

Protagonist Towner (Sophya) Whitney starts telling us her biographical tale by warning us not to believe her. She is a self-described liar, but having reached the end of the narrative (in which another point of view is also provided), I do not regard her as untruthful so much as deeply, seriously deluded, a fearful patient in denial so impenetrable that it requires breaking down with a sledge hammer. Towner's personal and psychological odyssey is a scary one, and the difficulty she experiences in coming to terms with it is fully understandable. This is an evocative page turner of a novel, and it is easy to fall under its spell. This book belongs on the shelf along side the likes of Rebecca, The Catcher in the Rye, and Housekeeping.

I know there are many fans of this book, and while I tried my best to be drawn in by the characters and the unusual story, I just couldn't care about any of it. The ending, as other reviewers point out, is a huge "huh" moment, and the characters often left me wondering - and not in a good way. There is a great deal of literary fiction I can recommend, like The Thrall's Tale or The Heretic's Daughter, both of which have multifaceted characters you care about. But this novel didn't move me at all, and by page fifty I was wondering when it would end.