THE LACE READER
Brunonia Barry's novel, THE LACE READER is novel about the timeless power of family ties, the use inherited characteristics as gifts or curses and why we are drawn back to our home by a crisis. Towner Whitney returns to her childhood home in Salem, Massachusetts to deal with a family crisis and begins to confront her haunted past.
The women in Towner’s family are gifted with the ability to “read” the future through the patterns in lace. Much as lace is delicate, intricate spun threads so is the book a patterned web of intrigue, mystery, deceit, entanglements, and heartache.
With a hometown of Salem, MA – America’s pre-eminent home of witchcraft, the plot ranges from the merely odd to the paranormal and perhaps only to places our own imagination stretches as we follow Towner’s story. As her Aunt reminds her "There are no accidents... everything happens for a reason."
This is a DuMarier genre novel and the author gives excellent descriptions of lace making and lace reading as well as the spoken and unspoken truths that are common to all families. It’s stylish with a psychological and perhaps otherwordly story that captures Towner and her family in a spell that can only be broken by confronting what has gone before.
