Threadneedle – The Language of Magic Book One by Cari Thomas

★★★★★

Thrilling and enthralling tale of modern-day witches and magic

“Magic is the first sin; we must bear it silently.”

Six women, all eerily similar in looks, are found hanging from the shattered windows of Big Ben, with a seventh noose empty. They become known as the Faceless Women. No one knows who they are or what they were doing in the clock tower at midnight.

Since the tragic deaths of her parents when she was a baby, teenager Anna Everdell has lived with her Aunt Vivienne in a cold, spartan, rigidly ordered London house, its pots of tightly closed rose buds that never open conveying the joylessness contained within. Vivienne is a Binder, a member of a much-feared group of the magical community who seek to keep magic secret and suppressed. Vivienne’s magic is powerful but kept buried deep within her, all her emotions and impulses controlled, tied up in intricate threads and knots she weaves with different coloured cords. Strict, intransigent and abusive, Vivienne uses her Binder magic to hurt and punish Anna in cruel, horrible ways under the guise of ‘discipline’ and ‘protection’. Determined that Anna will become a Binder like herself, Vivienne trains her niece and keeps her on a narrow path, but Anna’s magic appears to be weak and threadbare, constantly failing her. Anna is only able to express herself through her love of music and piano playing, and through her embroidery – the stitches serving as notes of the songs and desires to which she dare not give voice.

On the occasion of Anna’s sixteenth birthday, the vibrant, glamorous Selene, a friend of Vivienne and Anna’s late mother, returns from New York to London with her rebellious teenage daughter, Effie, and their mysterious young male friend, Attis. All three practise magic freely in a way Anna is forbidden to do, opening up a whole new world and outlook. When Effie and Attis join Anna as sixth form pupils at her school, the teenager’s life inexorably begins to change. Gradually, Effie’s defiant nature helps release Anna’s subdued spirit, enabling her slowly to begin resisting her aunt’s sadistic constraints, find friends among other unpopular, secretly magic pupils at school, discover how to unlock her true potential, and begin questioning everything she has always been told. Is she truly destined to be a Binder? How did her parents really die? What secrets is her aunt keeping that she will stop at nothing to prevent Anna from finding out?

An intriguing, absorbing, and exciting tale, Threadneedle immediately draws the reader into Anna’s life, evoking an extraordinary world in which starkly contrasting elements of contemporary teenage difficulties and dark fairy tales are sewn together into a seamless whole. Anna herself is a very believable, multi-faceted, and sympathetic POV heroine. Ground down by the years of her aunt’s cruelty and obsessive control, she has nonetheless developed a power and goodness which she at first cannot recognise or call upon owing to constant psychological and physical abuse, and the eroding of her self-esteem. What makes her especially intriguing and unusual is that she is not a standard heroine – of the two teenage girls, the fiery and devil-may-care Effie would seem to be the more typical ‘rebel’ heroine, but the tables are turned here unexpectedly and effectively. Anna’s hidden strength and intense inner life render her silent stoicism far more compelling as the plot unfolds, and the way in which she blossoms and comes into her own over the course of the story is a joy to read.

As multiple mysteries unravel, realisation dawns that nothing and no one are what they appear to be, creating a riveting and suspenseful page-turner which slowly but surely ratchets up the tension and delivers some choice twists along the way. Rival branches of magic are revealed to give the world depicted a convincing breadth and synergy. Ranging from Rowan, the bullied yet relentlessly cheerful school gossip with hidden depths, to Darcey, the ‘cool girl’ adversary and tormenter so awful that she makes Harry Potter’s Draco Malfoy look benign, the characters are wonderfully drawn, reflecting the novel’s great balance of light and dark (even Aunt Vivienne is graced with a hint of complexity beneath her overall monstrousness). As the first in a series, Threadneedle keeps the reader on tenterhooks throughout, caught up in Anna’s plight and the spell of magical realism the author skilfully weaves, creating along the way further questions to be answered in future books. Highly recommended.

Jo-Anne Blanco (as Arwen Evenstar) for Elite Group

Elite Group received a copy of the book to review

©Jo-Anne Blanco 2021