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Science Informer - The Lace Reader: A Novel
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List Price: $24.95
Our Price: $9.99
Your Save: $ 14.96 ( 60% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: William Morrow
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780061624766
ISBN: 0061624764
Label: William Morrow
Manufacturer: William Morrow
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 400
Publication Date: 2008-08-01
Publisher: William Morrow
Release Date: 2008-07-29
Studio: William Morrow
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: A novel that will be hard to forget
Comment: 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, Eva's daughter, also lives on the island, blinded and brain-damaged after a beating by her husband, Cal. May's daughters were twin girls, Towner and Lyndley. Lyndley committed suicide when she was seventeen and Towner left town, seeking a new life.
As the story opens, Eva has gone missing and Towner returns home, drawn by this family crisis. Towner seems to be the catalyst that causes old relationships and secrets to reemerge. Cal Boynton is back in town where he has reinvented himself as a religious leader of a cult-like following. A young girl, Angela Rickey, who is pregnant with Cal's child, also disappears. Towner's old love, Jack, is still in town and anxious to resume their relationship. In addition, a town policeman, Rafferty, also falls in love with Towner. Towner starts to untangle the mysteries that have haunted her life. Why did her twin commit suicide in front of her and Jack? What is the fixation that Cal has with the Whitney women? Towner slowly reveals the truth, sometimes reading lace to find patterns. The book rises to a page-turning climax where the truth that has formed this family is finally revealed.
The Lace Reader is a compelling and satisfying read. It explores the issues of sexual and physical abuse. The mindset of those who enter cults is investigated. Suicide and mental illness are other themes, along with lost love and the yearning to hide in the past. While it covers depressing material, the book is not a depressing one overall. Rather, it leaves the reader with a message of hope and the realization that the truth must be faced in order to lose its power to skew lives. Not easily forgotten, this book is recommended for all fiction readers.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not a good read...at all.
Comment: 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 of the characters and their relationships are confusing, and how they are related makes no sense, even when you get to the end of the novel. There is a random "witch hunt" thrown in the middle, evidently to keep the plot moving, but it just serves to make the book more unbelievable. This book could benefit from a heavy editor. One of the worst parts of the novel absolutely had to be when the author was talking about visiting the grave of her sister, and she noted that they had spelled her sister Lyndley's name wrong. The editing was just beyond awkward.
Very disappointing as a first novel. Confusing, disjointed, unfulfilling, and ultimately just a bad story from a novelist possibly obsessed with the area she is from. I'll give her two stars because I feel bad for her that this is her first novel. I hope she gets better. I wish I could get back the time it took me to read. I will never have those hours back.
Customer Rating:
Summary: blah, then good, then, huh?
Comment: 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 repeat their words, but suffice to say that the allover effect is disappointing. There was some real substance to the book, and unfortunately it was not sustained. I'd suggest taking it out from the library so that you don't regret paying for it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: It made me sad that it was not what I expected; but it was good
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: If you value your time, skip this
Comment: I won't go into the many, many, MANY reasons I loathed this book since so many other reviewers have said it more eloquently than I ever could. Just rest assured that I read tons of historical fiction and this is one of the worst examples of the genre. It's long, it's unnecessarily complicated, the characters are moved around like chess pieces across without rhyme or reason. I really wish I could get my money back on this. That's how much it aggravated me.
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Editorial Reviews:
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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."
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