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LACY EYE struggles to explain how the malevolent become evil and, in the end, finds no simple answer. Hanna and Joe were viciously attacked in their bedroom after an argument with their daughter, Dawn, and her boyfriend, Rud. Joe died at the scene of the crime, and Hanna lost her memory of the night along with some of her mental acuity. At the scene, before she was taken to the hospital, she whispered to the police that her daughter and Rud were responsible. Later, because of Dawn's alibi and Hanna's inability to recall the night of the attack, Rud is sent to jail while Dawn is not indicted but leaves town to start a new life. No one seems to believe Dawn is innocent other than Hanna; Hanna's other daughter and the rest of the town are shocked when Rud's appeal brings Dawn home to live with Hanna while Hanna tries to remember what happened that night so that she can testify.
Although, or maybe because, Dawn was socially inept and bullied throughout her childhood, something she blames on her lazy eye, she has always been Hanna's favorite. Hanna's memories of Dawn emerge slowly throughout the book, with Hanna seeming to play the meek mother to Dawn as manipulative daughter. Because Dawn's character is developed through the lens of Hanna's memories, the reader is caught between understanding Dawn as a victim of childhood cruelty or as a budding sociopath. The author, Jessica Treadway, convinces us that Dawn is a little of each without taking the easy route and implying that one leads to the other. It takes Hanna substantially longer to come to that conclusion than it does the reader. Because the reader views Dawn's actions through Hanna's eyes, it is not clear until the end of the book whether Dawn was involved in the attack on Hanna and Joe or not. The lacy eye of the title refers not only to the childhood name of Dawn's condition, but also to the way Hanna has of looking at the world through a gauze that obscures its harshness.
As Hanna confronts the past, she begins to grow beyond the timid and reserved woman she has always been, belatedly growing the moral core that had been missing prior to the attack. Although Treadway takes us back to Hanna's childhood, providing some of the circumstances that influenced Hanna's lack of a backbone, she doesn't allow Hanna to make excuses and take the easy way out. While the book is a thriller, it is also the story of Hanna's awakening. LACY EYE is complex and nuanced, and Treadway is an author to watch.
§ Sharon Mensing is the Head of School of Emerald Mountain School, an independent school in the mountains of Colorado, where she lives, reads, and enjoys the outdoors.
Reviewed by Sharon Mensing, January 2015
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