Book Eighteen: The Lace Reader

Book Eighteen: The Lace Reader
Finished: March 30
Pages: 385

I was drawn to this book when wandering around Borders with a 40% coupon burning a hole in my pocket. Since they didn't have the book that I wanted to buy, I thought I would just look around and pick up something that struck my fancy. The cover, of a woman standing in water, with lace around the edges of the book, was intriguing, and reminds me a lot of other books that I have read and enjoyed in the past, mostly the ones by Alice Hoffman (Don't judge, I was young!). In retrospect, I feel that I should have maybe looked a little further for a better book, maybe one that I would not have thrown across the room.
At first, and even up to half way through the book I really enjoyed the narration, the description, and the supernatural aspects of the book. The idea of reading lace: telling someone's fortune by looking at them through a veil of lace is interesting, and more unique than reading palms or Tarot cards. I also liked the atmosphere of Salem, with tourism encouraging witchcraft in a town that once killed "witches" although it could be an accurate depiction of Salem, I wouldn't know.
I will be perfectly honest with you. If you judge a book as "good" by your inability to put it down, then this book is certainly "good" by that standard. Usually when I say that I couldn't put the book down, at the end of the review I would talk about how much I liked the book and would recommend it to others. I literally could not stop reading this book, because I had to know more about what was going on. This book was often confusing, and ultimately made me so angry I couldn't think straight. At the end of the book I felt very betrayed, because although I had picked up on the fact that my narrator was unreliable (she admits to being in a psychiatric ward) I still did not expect the lies to be so all-encompassing. Honestly, I feel like I have read something similar a few years ago, where the narrator is such a liar that you don't even realize that whole characters are completely made up. It made me hate the narrator, because now I'm not sure what is and isn't real, and why some characters would be willing to die for her. It just didn't make sense.

Good Reading,
Caitlin