Review: Lacy Eye by Jessica Treadway

Hanna Schutt never suspected that her younger daughter's happiness would lead to her husband's death and the destruction of their family. When Dawn brings her new boyfriend home from college for a visit, her parents and sister try to hide their doubts because they're glad that Dawn - always an awkward child - appears to have grown into a confident, mature young woman in her relationship with Rud. But when Hanna and her husband, Joe, are beaten savagely in their bed, Rud becomes the chief suspect and stands trial for Joe's murder.

Claiming her boyfriend's innocence, Dawn estranges herself from her mother, who survived the attack with serious injuries and impaired memory. When Rud wins an appeal and Dawn returns to the family home saying she wants to support her mother, Hanna decides to try to remember details of that traumatic night so she can testify to keep her husband's murderer in jail, never guessing that the process might cause her to question everything she thought she knew about her daughter.

 

After I read the blurb for this one, I just had to read it. Can you imagine being in that situation?!? The premise was terribly frightening and I thought that it would be such an amazing book. Unfortunately, that is not exactly how this played out for me. At all.

At first, Lacy Eye really read like Gone Girl. That's all I could think about as I read it because it was so full of an inner monologue that never seemed to end. The difference is that the inner monologue did eventually go away in Gone Girl and it never really did with Lacy Eye. You're mostly just reading what the mom is remembering (at first) and thinking. Due to there being hardly any actual conversations this book just really dragged for me. I won't lie. It was boring. Positively boring. 

I think that the worst part is that I felt like I was wasting my time every moment that I had this book in my hands. That is horrible to say but the story really just didn't go anywhere for me. Sure, it went through the mom trying to recover her memory and then recovering her memory but it still felt like I was on this treadmill of death, just looking at a picture of a location in front of me and walking for forever but never realizing that I'll never actually get there. That's what this book was for me. 

The characters weren't interesting to me or even memorable, for that matter. And I found the main character, Hanna, to be a bit unrealistic. Her "memory loss" was just totally unrealistic to me. Because she seemed to have an amazing memory when she was bringing up things that had happened 23 years ago and she knew what everyone was wearing, how their hair looked, EXACTLY what they had said ... maybe that is an exaggeration but that is how it felt. I just couldn't connect with her or any of the other characters. I wish that I knew more about them. Not just the stuff that they had done but about who they actually were.  

I don't think that I'll pick up another novel by this author again. The writing wasn't bad, it just wasn't my cup of tea. Lacy Eye has really high ratings, which kind of surprises me but it shows that I am definitely in the minority on this one. But I'm totally okay with that.

This one is available March 10th, 2015.

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