the Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry

Another author with a 1st book for us to read. This was fortunately a good read; no skipping pages or skimming passages or characters. It was definitely an ambitious and risky book. It was ambitious to attempt to handle so many characters, and to try doing it with depth. I think losing a quarter of the characters would have tightened things up more to my liking. Another ambitious experiment was continuously switching points of view. In one of the final chapters, I swear she shifted from Rafferty to Jack to Towner to May. Sounds like a Diants triple play. It’s more work to maintain consistency with a single POV.

I acknowledge that these days, two POVs work better when translated into film scripts, but this was just laziness or impatience in getting the book finished. Maybe I’m just a 20th century reader, but I liked the way Lawrence Durrell handled four POVs by writing four versions of the same story in “The Alexandria Quartet.”

Barry took a lot of risk using the Salem witches as the sub-theme of her plotlines. She had to succeed in coming up with new and interesting aspects to this theme. If she failed, the publishing world would pillory her for a banal exploitation of the past. However, I thought her exploration of the lace making and lace reading was brilliant. Using this as the dominant theme of the book worked, especially the use in chapter introductions and as dialogue quoted adages. Another risky adventure for Barry was choosing a central character suffering from Schizoid Personality Disorder. Moreover, twin trauma; I can’t forget that. Didn’t we have a twin-trauma book just a few months ago.?.

This is all risky because Barry has chosen an unsympathetic primary protagonist. Thankfully, she has also given us Rafferty, who is very likeable. My next-door neighbor is like Towner. She moved in three years ago with all sorts of vague references to a troubled past. She does not chitchat with the neighbors; is not friends with any of us. Her dog’s name is “Rambo” and he scares the beegeebers out of all the other neighborhood dogs. He still growls, barks, and races back and forth after all the neighbors and their dogs. I’m personally glad that Barry took the risks; it made the book more challenging to follow and intriguing as the plot unfolded. I’m sure she cut her readership in half by using a crazy female lead.

I thought the use of the Calvinists as a deus ex machina was way over the top. Probably makes a great final scene for the movie, with burning torches and pitchforks, but we’ve had 87 Frankenstein movies in the past 100 years, so maybe that bit is a little clichéd. For balance, I would have preferred more depth about the island coven, and strangely, maybe more about the fishing aspect of town. Of course, everyone would want more about Rafferty’s back-story rather and not so much about the crazy lady’s.

Overall, this novel is full of 1st book flaws, but the sheer energy behind interesting and creative ideas carries this book up into the realm of good reads for serious readers.