‘Lace Makers’ weaves a charming tale
From the first few opening pages, Heather Barbieri’s “The Lace Makers of Glenmara’’ plunges the reader into the Ireland of back roads and small villages, with close-knit communities, old-fashioned values, and a slightly jarring, suspicious regard of some of the modernities of contemporary life. Into this world, a little like a stranger in a strange land, comes 26-year-old Seattle fashion designer Kate Robinson, traipsing through the country of her family’s heritage in search of solace and reinvention after being dumped by her longtime boyfriend for one of her models and so-called friends. “She was ready for something new, to be someone new.’’
After nearly a month of wandering, she hitches a ride one cold, relentlessly rainy day in a horse-drawn wagon with a promising character named William the Traveler. (Alas, he is only a means to an end, dropping her off at the quaint, run-down little fishing village of Glenmara, before going on his way.) Only intending to stay a day before moving on herself, Kate finds herself enchanted by the locals, especially a nurturing sweet-faced lace maker named Bernie, selling her exquisite, intricate wares along the village’s main street.
Rather quickly, Bernie takes in the wayward straggler and draws her into her circle of fellow lace makers, who welcome Kate with surprising (i.e., not terribly realistic) grace and warmth. Bernie, trying to move forward with her life after losing her beloved husband, finds renewed purpose in taking Kate under her wing. Colleen, the wife of a fisherman, is always worrying about her husband’s long trips at sea. Oona, in remission from breast cancer, secretly questions the strength and depth of her marriage. Moira struggles with self-worth, caught in a cycle of domestic abuse and denial. Of the women, only Bernie’s best friend Aileen, dealing with the challenges of a difficult teenage daughter, frankly regards Kate as an interloper, feeling threatened by Bernie’s attachment to the young newcomer. They are a colorful crew, but none is individually as vivid and convincing as Kate herself, representing more character types than evoking a real sense of flesh and blood.
Then there’s Father Byrne, who keeps watch over his flock with a pair of binoculars and the iron fist of righteous indignation. He provides the story’s dramatic conflict when Kate’s fashion inspiration kicks in and she suggests the lace makers use their talents to launch a new line of lace-embellished lingerie. It’s not an entirely persuasive plot device, but it serves as a metaphor for Kate’s reinvention as well as the reinvigoration of a community struggling to integrate past and present.
Barbieri’s deft writing style is charmingly wry yet evocative, with details and descriptions both telling and vivid, as when Kate finds herself walking a desolate road, “the rain her sole companion. It was an entertainer, the Irish rain, performing an endless variety of tricks for her amusement. It blew sideways, pounded and sighed and dripped. It hailed neat little balls of ice that melted off her hood and shoulders. She did her best to ignore it. She knew the type. She was from Seattle.’’
Right in the middle of the novel, the storytelling succumbs to a bit of unfortunate romantic melodrama. Bernie encounters the ghost of her dead husband, and Kate has a rather cutesy and convenient love-at-first sight moment with the enigmatic local sculptor Sullivan Deane, who harbors a secret or two that gives the book a twinge of suspense and the expected love interest. But aside from a shocking tragedy that comes out of left field, mostly “The Lace Makers’’ is fairly predictable and pleasantly satisfying. It’s a sweet summertime yarn (pun intended) that never quite lives up to its intriguing premise, but nonetheless provides a lovely, leisurely escape to the bucolic charms of the Emerald Isle.
Karen Campbell is a freelance writer based in Brookline. 
