The Lace Reader - Brunonia Barry

The Lace Reader was my final book for my 2017 Popsugar Reading Challenge.  The category was "A book recommended by an author you love."  An author I love is definitely Tamora Pierce, and luckily for me, she has a list of recommended books up on her website--and I already had The Lace Reader on my Kindle, so it was an easy pick.

The main character is narrator Towner, a self-proclaimed unreliable narrator.  On the very first page of the book, Towner (whose real name is not even Towner) proclaims that she always lies, which about sets the tone for the rest of the book.  However, it's pretty clearly not Towner's fault that she lies; she has gaps in her memory and some apparent delusions, all centered around a traumatic past involving the death of her twin sister and a family member who heads an extremely conservative cult, the kind that believes in burning witches, and who happens to believe that Towner and several of her female family members are witches.  You can imagine how well this family functions.

The story takes place when Towner returns to Salem (as in the Salem Witch Trials) after years of being away in the wake of the death of her aunt, to whom she was very close.  Towner thinks there's something suspicious about Eva's death, as does a local cop who liked Eva and becomes close with Towner.  But returning dredges up all kinds of stuff that was probably better buried, puts Towner back in the path of her crazy, cult-leading uncle, and also entwines her in a missing persons case for a young woman who belonged to the uncle's cult.

The book is divided up into a few different formats.  There are first-person chunks from Towner's perspective, third-person chunks that focus on Detective Rafferty, and also some documents, including snippets from "The Lace Reader's Guide," a sort of journal that Eva kept, and a journal that Towner herself kept while she was staying in a psychiatric hospital following the death of her twin.  I think all of these worked well together, for the most part, and I did like her general writing style.  I think the writing felt fluid and she did a great job building a sense of Salem as a place.  The supporting characters were well done, and for most of the book I liked trying to figure out what was true and what wasn't based on what Towner and the other characters told us.

However.  Ultimately, some of the execution here fell flat.  There were just too many holes left at the end, too many things that seemed to contradict what we'd been told for the rest of the book.  If the things that we find out at the end are true, then a lot of townspeople were just going along with Towner's delusions, which didn't feel like it was the case throughout most of the book.  Yes, people said that Towner was crazy--which she kind of was--but no one seemed to indicate anything that directly contradicted anything that she, as a narrator, presented to us.  And they probably should have.  Even if people weren't willing to say something to Towner's face, she--like the other women in her family--was psychic and could pick up on people's thoughts, which certainly seems like it should have brought something to the surface that wasn't there.  And when things do start coming out in the epilogue of the book, it's kind of a jumble and too many things are left unexplained, and though Towner herself seems to know what's what at the end, we as readers do not, which is strange considering she was narrating.

Overall, I think this is a book that needs more than one read-through; I'd need to go back through it knowing what I did know at the end to try to tease some of the loose pieces out of the earlier portions of the book.  However, I don't think this should be a necessary storytelling device.  I enjoyed this, but think that the structure overall had some issues in the unreliability category.  Still, the writing was good and I'd definitely be open to reading more by Barry.

3 stars out of 5.