Lacy Eye

by Jessica Treadway

Overview

A 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781455554089
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	03/01/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.80(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Jessica Treadway is the author of Lacy Eye, And Give You Peace, and two story collections, Absent Without Leave and Other Stories and Please Come Back to Me, which received the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. A professor at Emerson College in Boston, she lives with her husband in Lexington, Massachusetts.

Editorial Reviews

"Deftly plotted... Treadway paints a devastating portrait of a family torn apart from both the outside and within."—Publishers Weekly

"An intricately plotted psychological thriller."
—The Chicago Tribune

"Since her debut story collection 'Absent Without Leave,' came out in 1992, Jessica Treadway has wowed critics with resonant depictions of flawed, all-too-human characters."
—The Boston Globe

"Quietly disturbing...nail-bitingly suspenseful."—The Columbus Dispatch

"Complex and nuanced...an author to watch."
—Reviewing the Evidence

"Treadway is a deft hand at crafting complex mysteries...asks provocative questions."—The Reading Nook

From the Publisher

01/26/2015
In this deftly plotted psychological thriller from Treadway (And Give You Peace), a brutal home invasion leaves Hanna Schutt permanently disfigured and her husband, Joe, dead. The speech-impaired Hanna communicates to the police, via what the press dubs “the Nods,” that the culprit is Rud Petty, the boyfriend of her younger daughter, Dawn. This, in addition to circumstantial evidence, leads to Petty’s conviction. Three years later, Petty has won an appeal, and Hanna is terrified the case will hinge on her faulty memory. College-age Dawn—always an awkward child who was teased mercilessly for her lazy eye—returns to the family home in upstate New York for the first time since the tragedy. It’s common knowledge the prosecution sought to indict her for her role in the attack, but charges wouldn’t stick. Hanna must learn to separate her fierce love for her daughter and the slowly emerging truth about that fateful night. Treadway paints a devastating portrait of a family torn apart from both the outside and within. Five-city author tour. Agent: Kimberly Witherspoon, Inkwell Management. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

2015-01-08
Treadway checks in with this novel about family, emotional wounds and blind love. Hanna cheated death three years ago when an intruder came into her Everton, New York, home and beat her accountant husband, Joe, to death as the two were sleeping, but she was left with physical scars and traumatic brain injury. Now the man believed to be their attacker, Rud Petty, has won an appeal and will be getting a new trial, and Hanna is being asked to testify though she doesn't remember the night of the attack. Rud was the boyfriend of Hanna and Joe's daughter Dawn, who's now living in Santa Fe and trying to start a new life. While the prosecutor, Gail Nazarian, tries to make Hanna take the stand, Hanna starts to convince herself that the man she saw the night Joe died wasn't Rud but Emmett Furth, a troubled neighbor boy. To the horror of her eldest daughter, Iris, she welcomes Dawn back into her home. Although a grand jury failed to indict Dawn—who has always been odd—many, including Nazarian and Iris, believe she was involved in the attack. Treadway carefully constructs a scenario in which a mother is asked to believe that her child could not only be an accessory to her husband's coldblooded killing, but has ulterior motives in coming to visit her. Wading knee deep in the suspicions of others, Hanna continues to defend Dawn even though Dawn's own dodgy behavior makes her a perfect suspect. Treadway's book is an excellent exploration of the agony that often accompanies parenthood, but every now and then, readers will find themselves wanting to smack some common sense into Hanna. A worthwhile story marred by a terrible title.

Kirkus Reviews