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The Traditional Sunday Lunch: Favourite Dishes for Family Meals, with 70 Traditional Starters, Main Courses and Desserts

Annette Yates

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The vital components of a Sunday lunch are a plentiful supply of food, beginning with a small...

Ivana A. | Diary of Difference (1171 KP) rated A Single Thread in Books

Feb 3, 2020

A Single Thread

Tracy Chevalier | 2019 | Fiction & Poetry

9.0

(2 Ratings)

Book Rating

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When the team from LoveReading UK contacted me regarding A Single Thread, all I knew was that I loved Girl With A Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier and would therefore read any other book she writes.

A Single Thread follows the life of Violet, during the year 1932, a few years after the First World War. Violet has lost her brother and fiance in the war and is still learning to cope. She is labelled as a ”surplus woman” by the society, a woman that in unlikely to marry.

With the grief, the society label and the suffocation of her mother, Violet starts a journey that will change her life.

She is determined to find where she belongs and who she truly is, in a time where being a woman and succeeding on your own was not praised by others.

Her journey starts with a long walk in a few towns, something she used to do with her late father and brother, and it continues with her learning canvas embroidery (today knows as needlepoint), and the beautiful art of bell ringing (which pleasantly reminded me of The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo, a book I read in high school and one I should re-read).

With Tracy’s writing, it is always so easy to lose yourself in the book and teleport to the past and re-live every scene as if you’re there. It is such a pleasurable experience.

I loved Violet, and I loved how she coped with all challenges of that era. Post First World War times were extremely hard, with too many men dying and too many women not being able to ever marry. Violet’s courage and hope kept moving her forward!

This novel yells courage. It yells freedom. It yells independence. And standing along Violet, while she finds courage when you least expect to was a moment I will cherish.

I recommend it to you, if you love novels in the war time period, or novels that talk about courage!

Thank you to the team at LoveReading UK, for sending me a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

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Kudos

Karl Hyde recommended Low by David Bowie in Music (curated)

Low by David Bowie

1977 | Rock

9.3

(4 Ratings)

Album Favorite

"Me and Rick were living in a terraced house in Splott in Cardiff, near Tiger Bay. That’s where we formed our first band, Freur. We were making dub electronics and listening to dub reggae and Kraftwerk’s Computer World and Bowie’s Low. What blew us away was Brian’s (Eno) analogue electronic sound – that kind of degraded sound that he was making – and the fact that this great icon, a hugely famous singer and frontman, had chosen not to sing for half an album. What guts and courage that seemed to take. Years later you read that it ended up like that because he wasn’t around and that Brian experimented in his absence. But it takes great foresight and courage for David to come back and hear that and say, "yep, that’s the album." And not to think that because he’s a singer he has to blast away over the top of it. So that became a part of the blueprint for Underworld – that the singer doesn’t have to be the dominant force. He can play a supporting role. That Berlin period – the three Bowie albums and the Iggy Pop record – deepened the mythology of what I love about Berlin. The idea of going to a place and locking yourself away and making quite an extreme record in a different environment"

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Kudos

Lea Eden Patrick (0 KP) rated The Princess Diarist in Books

Feb 9, 2018

Excellent, raw, comedic writing. Also a truly honest self-reveal (0 more)

I cried!

Carrie was a lovely person, a wonderful writer, and the honesty and courage with which she tells this story are commendable! It’s hilarious and self-deprecating humor are both refreshing and depressing. I couldn’t help but feel for her. She will be missed on screen and off. Her willingness to speak so loudly and often about her mental health struggles did SO much for others with similar issues and she rarely is credited for those advancements her frankness gave to the field of mental health study. A haunting read so close to her death.