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kali 's review for:
A Single Thread
by Tracy Chevalier
This was a lovely read. Violet is a single woman, aged 38, an aberration to what is expected of a woman's role in 1932. She leaves her crotchety mother (nursing her own grief at losing a son in the war), for a new life in Winchester, working as a typist. I find the 1930s a fascinating era, as women and communities were still working through the social changes that lingered from the effects of WW1, of how to fill the missing generations of young men, and the transformation of women's roles, their (partial) right to vote. Violet searches for connection, and finds it with other women in a broderers group, doing needlepoint for cathedral cushions and kneelers. There are many motifs of pattern, repetition, paralleled in the examination of bellringing through an older male character, and subtle changes to the pattern that at first appear to make a chaotic sound or misinterpreted symbol become powerful indicators of change. A single thread can be a voice against oppression, against oppressive traditions. There are men's spaces, and women's spaces. Where does a single woman fit in? Can she navigate an open field, or sit in a pub alone, without suspicion and risk? So much as changed since the 1930s, and yet the issues of women who transgress their 'spaces' and the roles they are expected to conform to within these spaces, persists. As I well know, as a single mother. And as every woman who wants to walk alone at night knows.