Last year I read The Fifth Petal by Brunonia Barry and LOVED it.   The Lace Reader was actually the first book in Barry’s Salem setting, and I’ve been eager to read it for a while.  It’s perfect for those who love traditional paranormal — psychic, witches, and beyond. 

A very old ARC was sent to me through PaperBackSwap (which usually doesn’t allow ARCs).  Hopefully some of the errors and typos were corrected in the final print.  This copy had a lovely appearance, though, with a linen textured cover and deckle pages.  The inner pages even had a bit of speckled antiquity, as well as some faded print which made it slightly difficult to read sometimes. This book was about 388 pages, which isn’t tremendously daunting, other than the fact that the book was larger than most AND the font was pretty small.

I was totally intrigued by Towner Whitney’s story.  Knowing a little bit about her from The Fifth Petal, it was really nice to find out about her developmental years.  So much of Salem’s culture and backdrop sets the tone for The Lace Reader, and it was really mesmerizing.  The story moves VERY slowly, though, and I found myself lost a few times.  Again, that might have been something that was refined in the final product.

My biggest complaint is that the end of the book blew by so suddenly!  Barry changed things up big time in the last chapters.  I honestly needed a quick summary to make sure I understood exactly what happened.

The paranormal aspects were beautifully done.  Barry put a twist on the idea of reading tea leaves and, instead, had her characters “read” lace.  A fair bit of mind reading and premonition take place, too.  The witches described in The Lace Reader are more of Mother Earth natural types, not black magic spell-casting witches.  A demon-casting cult is thrown in for good measure, too.  All in all, this book makes me want to go back and read The Fifth Petal again!

Do you like books about the paranormal?