Rating: 
Summary: Absolutely Luscious!
Review: I haven't enjoyed reading a story this much in a long time. I felt like I was in the mountains of Turkey. I could see and feel and smell every inch of Nurdane's world. The history and the culture were beautifully woven into a compelling, almost mystical story of a girl growing up in harsh surroundings and finding herself.
Rating:
Summary: WOW - Too Great for Words!
Review: I just finished reading the Virgin's Knot. It is one of the first books I have read cover to cover without putting down. What a wonderful debut for the author. I am anxiously awaiting another story from this talented woman. Please read this book and tell all of your reading friends - simply wonderful!!
Rating:
Summary: A beautiful experience
Review: I loved reading this wonderfully visual novel. I had the feeling the author was there with me during the entire journey. Holly Payne's devotion to sensory writing allows you to experience not only the sights and sounds of Turkey, but also sensations like tearoom aromas and the texture of the lead character's hands as she masterfully creates her rugs. In addition to its ethereal reflections, the novel is finely balanced with historical and political accuracy. I hope Ms. Payne has more work on the way. I would love to repeat the experience I had while reading her first novel!
Rating: 
Summary: A Promising Start, But.....
Review: I loved this book--up until the very end. The character development was good, and the story lines well-developed. Until the end of the book, that is. Just when you think things are getting interesting, it all comes to an abrupt and unsatisfying end. The fates of two supporting characters are left hanging. The fates of the three main characters could have been so much better delineated but are truncated, and unnecessarily so, in my opinion. Shame on this author for taking the coward's way out--just because you do not know quite where to take your characters, it is not kosher to knock them off. Shame on the editor for allowing this. This story would have been so much richer and more complex, and the book so much the better for it, had the story lines been allowed to develop and come to some sort of conclusion other than the one that did occur.Other than this, the story is well-crafted, and full of rich detail. Other than a few details about weaving that are incorrect (one cannot strum weft, for example), it is easy to be drawn into the fabric of the tale, and the book becomes addictive. I would like to have seen how Nurdane overcame the constraints of her culture and learned to live and love. I also wish someone in the village knew what a tourniquet was, for Pete's sake!!
Rating: 
Summary: BEWARE--BAD BOOK--BEWARE--LEAVE IMMEDIATELY
Review: I read this book over a long trip to Austria for a business trip. The plot seemed interesting and I was hopiing that it would give me a good insight into the feminist viewpoint in Turkey.
By the time I reached page 70, I began to wonder where was that all I hoped for. It took so long to actually understand what this book is about that if it weren't for the jacket cover, I still wouldn't what the plot of this book is.
If it were up to me, I would give the jacket writer a book deal rather than give one to Holly Payne. The jacket writer obviously was able make sense of whatever was written and put it into a coherent plot line. That's the sign of a good writer, not the writing of Holly Payne.
The dialogue in her book is very bad and almost at a level of being elementary. Characters answer each other in one word responses and continue to repeat themselves to no end.
I noticed that there is another book of hers coming out and if The Virgin's Knot is of any indication of what is to come, I surely won't buy it. Maybe, if it was a cold day and I needed something to start a fire with.
Main point: Stay away from this book.
Rating:
Summary: A Gem Of A Magic Carpet Ride
Review: I thought this book was an absolute gem. The writing was fluid and poetic with several original passages that will haunt my memory and imagination for a long time to come. Ali's words in the rain are especially poignant and I truly feel that all readers will connect with this book in more ways than one. As a male reader I was afraid that this might be "a women's book", but it superceded gender. The male characters were in fact stronger than I would have expected and I identified well with several of them. My only chagrin was with the ending...I wanted the book to go on. I certainly look forward to the next book by this promising new author.
Rating:
Summary: A Devastatingly Beautiful 1st Novel
Review: My heart was swept away by this stunning 1st novel and fell in love and felt so much empathy with not only
the heroine, Nurdane, but with so many of the surrounding characters including the little boy, Muammer....It is a very intriguing and complex world Ms. Payne has immersed her first novel in. And her prose is engaging, touching, heartfelt and devastatingly beautiful. I am so looking forward to reading more of her work in the future.
Rating:
Summary: Virgin's Knot romantic and thought provoking
Review: Nurdane, is a weaver living high in the remote mountain village of Mavisu. Disabled in early childhood, she cannot hope to be a bride like those for whom she weaves her astonishing rugs. But she dreams, comforted by the knowledge that as long as long as her hands remain pure, her skill, a gift from Allah, will remain.
Fathers in her village compete with one another, convinced their sin of bearing daughters will be expiated by the arrival of grandsons, if only marriages can be consummated on one of Nurdane's mystical rugs. When American physical anthropologist, John Hennessey arrives, eager to find proof of Cybelle the ancient Goddess whom he believes will free the women from their male-imposed Islamic shackles, Nurdane is drawn to him.
Femininity lost, suppressed and denied by centuries of tradition and religious observance the warp, interlaced with a weft of emerging independence through forbidden education and societal change.
Holly Payne's first novel is set in 1950's Turkey amongst the people and the land she loves. With a richness and beauty like the hand-woven rugs themselves, she ties us, knot by knot into village life and beliefs, some of which endure to this day. As Nurdane weaves and dreams of one day lying on her own dowry rug, she knows she must sacrifice something to Allah: her skill as a renowned weaver of healing rugs, or her womanhood. The emergence of women and matriarchal power in society has been a theme in literature for centuries and Holly Payne adds to that library with this delicate, magical book.
Rating:
Summary: The Virgin Novel
Review: Plot: a young Turkish women stricken with polio wields the great gift of weaving beautiful rugs, that some feel, grant miracles to their owners. Unhappy herself, the woman finds potential happiness in a traveling anthropologist. Sound interesting? It is. At least that part is. The problem is Holly Payne. Never have I read such a terrible book with this much potential. Holly Payne has overwritten 'The Virgin's Knot' as to make it painful to read. At times, I struggled to finish. But maybe I'm being too hard. If you're the kind of reader that feels that adding the word 'incredulous' to a sentence makes it better, then you'll love this book! 'Incredulous' is used incredulously! Midway through, I begged for no more appearances of the word, but like the inevitability of the sun's rising, there it appeared every couple of pages. And the sun, I have a bone to pick with it too. In this novel, everything glistens 'in the light', or moves 'in the light', or walks 'in the light'. If you're in Holly Payne's world, you're not just tan, you're tan 'in the light'. But that's not entirely true. Sometimes your tan 'in the hard light' or 'sharp light' or 'moonlight' (for those night tannings). This dark story is told with light just about everywhere. Oh yeah... also, no one can hear for some reason. All of the characters respond to every initial bit of dialogue with the perceptive response of, "what?" A good chunk of the book consists of dialogue being repeated for these hard of hearing what-sayers. Perhaps all the 'what-ing' is supposed to infuse the dialogue with a sense of shock or amazement (in the light), while in fact, its just silly. All that said, if you read incredibly fast... so fast that you don't pay attention to any of the words... and don't mind an unfinished story with a terrible ending... then this is the book for you.
Rating:
Summary: Great story, lousy writing.
Review: The story was just what I wanted, just what I was looking for, a story about another time, another place, another culture... a
story that could take me away from my current reality and at the same time teach me about another culture. You have to love Nurdane and identify with her. The characters and the story were strong. But the writing was bad enough at times to be distracting. The total lack of quotation marks in the entire book was my first annoyance. A lousy attempt at being different that serves no
purpose at all and only confuses things horribly. Then some of the writing was just... it made me think of "overacting". Things were over-described and it made me think of
Snoopy on his doghouse w/ his typewriter typing "it was a dark and stormy night". Not everything has to be described and
compared to something else. Why can't the character just wipe the sweat from his neck? Why does he have to catch a fly
between his fingers at the same time? It makes no sense. There were many flaws and inconsistencies in the book beyond the amateurish writing style. Things such as a mention of a
transistor radio playing and then later saying that the record stopped and all you could hear was the scraping of the needle.
Well, was it a transistor radio or was it a record player? And how does one rest their their knee on their chin? Unless you are
a contortionist, it's probably the other way around. There's mention of wild board roaming the area and then later there's mention of how boars in the area went extinct many
years earlier due to polio. Well, which is it then? I also felt the book was written like the script for a tv-movie. Too many paragraphs start with the likes of; "A crack of
thunder." "The shuffle of feet." It sounds more like instructions for a sound crew than it does creative writing. Almost every scene begins with '"HE" did this' or '"SHE" did that' and you don't know WHO "he" or "she" is until you read a
few paragraphs, then you have to go back an RE-read the beginning to put the right image in your head. The story never finishes either. What happened in the end to Ayse? And all this talk on the flap about love... it's not until the very end of the book that you even begin to get a glimpse of who loves
who and why. If you can stand the writing flaws, the story is nice, although the end was such a let-down I wanted to just scream.
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