Lacy Eye

Lacy Eye by Jessica Treadway (Mar 10, 2015)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 10, 2015A haunting, evocative novel about a woman who might have to face the disturbing truth about her own daughter.
Hanna and Joe send their awkward daughter Dawn off to college hoping that she will finally "come into her own." When she brings her new boyfriend, Rud, to her sister's wedding, her parents try to suppress their troubling impressions of him for Dawn's sake. Not long after, Hanna and Joe suffer a savage attack at home, resulting in Joe's death and Hanna's severe injury and memory loss. 
Rud is convicted of the crime, and the community speculates that Dawn may also have been involved. When Rud wins an appeal and Dawn returns to live in the family home, Hanna resolves to recall that traumatic night so she can testify in the retrial, exonerate her daughter, and keep her husband's murderer in jail. 
But as those memories resurface, Hanna faces the question of whether she knows her own daughter-and whether she ever did.

Wow...just WOW.  This is by no means the perfect book, nor is it even the most enjoyable.  However it is a book that grabs you by the back of the neck and shakes you until you don't know whether you are coming or going.  It forces us to face the question of -do we really know the people we love the most in the world, and how far would we go to make them happy.

As the synopsis says - Hanna is the only one left alive when her husband and she are attacked by Cricket bat wielding intruders.  Hanna did live through massive injuries but not with all her memories intact. Now the man put behind bars for this murder is getting a new trial and just guess as to who his beloved girlfriend is, and she has been since before the attack...Dawn, Joe and Hanna's youngest and oddest daughter. She too had been implicated but never brought to trial.

This book is told from Hanna's point of view, more like an autobiography than a novel. This ploy helps us keep on track of wondering what really happened that fateful night.

This story skips around quite a bit, helping us to fill in the personalities of the main players.  It helped me so much that I wanted to alternately smack the heck out of the parents sometimes and then smack the daughter other times.  The mother can come off as very naive, head-in-the-sand type,  yet she is loving with her whole heart.  The daughter can come off as a pathetically bullied misfit - but on the other hand, she can give you chills.

Now Hanna is regaining her memory-in huge chunks and it is fascinating to be there when she realizes just what happened that night and all is not what she was led to believe.

An ensnaring novel that is both gritty and clever, at times tedious yet still fascinating enough so you can't put it down.