Threadneedle by Cari Thomas

I would like to thank Harper Voyager and Anne from Random Things Tours for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – Harper Voyager

Published – Out Now

Price – £14.99 hardcover £7.99 Kindle eBook

Anna’s Aunt has always warned her of the dangers of magic. Its twists. Its knots. Its deadly consequences.

Now Anna counts down the days to the ceremony that will bind her magic forever.

Until she meets Effie and Attis.

They open her eyes to a London she never knew existed. A shop that sells memories. A secret library where the librarian feeds off words. A club where revellers lose themselves in a haze of spells.

But as she is swept deeper into this world, Anna begins to wonder if her Aunt was right all along.

Is her magic a gift … or a curse?

Teenagers and rebellion go together like ice cream and the beach. On the one hand it is hormones, boundary pushing and annoying people with loud music; but it is also the important part of working out who you are and not what your family, school or even circle of friends want you to be and starting to find your ow place in the world. In Cari Thomas’ Threadneedle the start to a new fantasy series we see a young teenager suddenly faced with all the truths, treats and dangers of the adult world – one only heightened with the ability for magic.

Anna tragically lost her parents at a young age and has been living with her Aunt ever since. But Anna’s family also had magic in their history and her mother was a powerful witch. Aunt too has the ability but has joined a group/cult known as The Binders who repress magical urges and also anything else tempting that they will class evil. Anna’s severe teaching by her Aunt has made her repressed; scared to raise her head in school and very clear she has virtually no magical ability. Into this on her sixteenth birthday walks in her mother’s best friend Selene and her ultra-rebellious daughter Effie and her unusual but charismatic friend Attis. Happy to tell people they have magical ability and very much one to challenge authority be that teachers or Anna’s school own pecking order of the great and good lording it over the others. Anna is both repelled and frightened but soon Effie seeks to show Anna that magic is fun and that what her Aunt has been doing may not have been in her best interests. Anna discovers she is not the only one at school who may be magical, and a set of family secrets are soon to finally be revealed.

I’ll caveat my thoughts on this story by saying that stories set predominantly in a school are not my favourite type of tales usually (I was more than happy to leave!). Threadneedle impressed me how Thomas has created a world with a strange and uneasy relationship with magic. It is known to exist but feels also to be doubted and yet strange societies like the Binders are clearly in opposition to it being used (even though its members all have some form of power). You get a sense of a big magical world with many secrets to explore. Thomas also can make the story quite dark – Anna’s treatment by Aunt learning to repress her magic and as we find out increasingly control what she is capable of puts the story into disturbing territory. This story has bite, and we also see that Thomas gets that sense of school being a place where if you are deemed unsuitable by either teachers or those at the top of the society then you’ll soon find life painful. There is a lot of example of teenage bullying that captures the petty cruelty of teenagers well – schools are ecosystems with lots of dangers to navigate.

This gets balanced by Anna’s relationships with Effie and Attis that challenge and also awaken her own streak of independence. Magic here is about empowerment and rebellion. Through a growing friendship with other young women at her school a coven gets formed and they realise they can use magic for glamour, fun and learning to be more than they are told they can be. This then sets them all on a collision course with the Binders and in particular Aunt. It was very hard not to think of the movie The Craft watching the gang of (this time very middle class) girls empower themselves and start to challenge what magic can do to rebalance their world.

My reservation on the tale is that we are spending a lot of time watching Anna’s day to day life and the pacing of the story is quite slow combined with a lot of mechanical plotting of revelation and exposition as Anna gets introduced to magical groups, magical principles and the bones of the world. I felt I was getting a lot of being told important things that would be very important later rather than work out the story myself. I think my other issue is the dialogue for me didn’t sound like teenagers that I recognise (which may be my own age or that Liverpool’s are very different to London’s!) but this sounded very upper middle class all round and I didn’t warm to any of the characters including Anna who for large parts of the book has things done to her rather than she makes moves herself. As someone moving out of years of forced repression perhaps that is to be expected but I think I needed a bit more life to Anna to make me wholly supportive.

Threadneedle will think find an audience for those who enjoy tales of growing up and discovering a magical world is just next to the one we know. I hope that now the core of the story and world has been set up that Thomas can move into a faster gear and release a lot of the series’ potential.