So I just finished this haunting little jewel tonight. In retrospect it has taken me a while to finish it, I bought it over a year ago. When I first started reading it I just couldn't get into it, so I tucked it away back into my small library in my office. I'm not sure what exactly made me pick it up again, but I'm glad that I did. In two weeks flat I finished this chilling story told by the unreliable narrator Towner Whitney.
Towner discovers the truth behind her twin sister suicide and also things about herself.
Here are a few snippets from the Guardian's review:
Set in contemporary Salem, The Lace Reader is the tale of a family of lace makers hotly endowed with prophetic gifts. The protagonist, Towner Whitney, has returned home from California after pledging both to avoid the Salem of her childhood and to give up her clairvoyant lace reading habits. As a teenager, the alleged witnessing of her twin sister's suicide caused her to flee the town and spend time in a mental institution. "I lie all the time," says Towner, and indeed the story that follows is a bewildering patchwork of unreliable narration, fantasy episodes, supernatural visions and shifting voices.
The unexplained death of her beloved substitute mother, great aunt Eva Whitney, has finally pulled Towner back to this source of nightmares. Eva ran etiquette classes in a tea room choked with dainty doilies and hushed chat, and was considered the greatest lace reader of all, detecting images of a client's past, present and future in the cloth's patterns. Though Eva's drowned body is found, Towner continues to converse with her somewhat prosaic ghost, just as she frequently invokes the image of her dead sister. Recovering from a hysterectomy, Towner is clearly fragile, but her multi-stranded versions of events, interspersed with other narrative voices, mean that our grip on reality is tenuous.
