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: August 01, 2008 Publisher: William Morrow Release Date: July 29, 2008 Sales Rank: 2319 Studio: William Morrow
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, 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 ... Read More
Not a good read...at all.
I read The Lace Reader: A Novel 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, ... Read More
blah, then good, then, huh?
I just finished The Lace Reader: A Novel 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.
It made me sad that it was not what I expected; but it was good
The lacking part of The Lace Reader: A Novel 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.
If you value your time, skip this
I won't go into the many, many, MANY reasons I loathed The Lace Reader: A Novel 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.
