Appreciation : 

Summary
Towner Whitney, the self-confessed unreliable narrator of The Lace Reader, hails from a family of Salem women who can read the future in the patterns in lace, and who have guarded a history of secrets going back generations, but the disappearance of two women brings Towner home to Salem and the truth about the death of her twin sister to light.

The Lace Reader is a mesmerizing tale that spirals into a world of secrets, confused identities, lies, and half-truths in which the reader quickly finds it’s nearly impossible to separate fact from fiction, but as Towner Whitney points out early on in the novel, “There are no accidents.”

My review

I should have loved this book, full of appealing themes such as witchcraft, an old and weird family, an hallucinating heroine, complex family relationships, unexplained deaths and disappearances. Well, I made a huge effort up to the half but was fed up long before I gave up, realising there no action, no captivating plot, nothing that could keep me awake.

I didn’t like the style, due to the translation, maybe, maybe not, I couldn’t tell, but that was enough to put me off. I will skip the details about French expressions that are not even correct French, but I found some dialogues a bit confusing, and the changing of points of view being awkward and clumsy.

The narration seemed full of promise but soon I felt bored, stuck in a wimpy story. Honestly, the characters have a strong background, however, I felt no empathy for them, no curiosity, this family had a great potential but the way the author dealt with it spoiled all the interest of the plot. The style is cold, impersonal, making the characters distant and void. The conflict between the witches and the Calvinists is hilarious and anachronistic, far from being credible. The basic plot was rich an intense, dealing with mental illness, child and women abuse, and a duality between reality and delusion, however, nothing captivating pops up from this rich background. An interesting story that turns out to be a trivial and boring book.