Time travel, women's suffrage and letterpress printing techniques come together in this intriguing new book.

Advanced reader copy provided by edelweiss. ( )

When a girl encountered a social injustice and magical shawl, the wheel of fate began to spin — she time travels with a mysterious girl, Serakh, and the shawl to the biblical time for the mission: advise and encourage five sisters who are about losing their father’s inherit land just because they are girls.

The time was the beginning of nineteen century in Portland Oregon, US. Miriam is an ordinary sixteen-year-old American girl of a wealthy family. Her father, originally from German, running a printing, is a patriarchal parent. Her mother, Portland native, is obedient to her husband and wants Miriam to follow suit.

When Miriam’s hopes for becoming a typographer and succeeding her father’s print shop were dashed and she was forced into an arranged marriage, she decided to participate in suffrage activities to change the society and achieve her object.

Since I took a feminism class and learned about the first wave of feminism movement from macro perspectives, I am interested in the micro perspectives. In the class, I learned that the first feminism movement occurred in the beginning of nineteen century by wealthy white women for suffrage. Miriam’s motivation was personal, but she accidentally faced the suffrage movement; as a result, she got involved in political activity, trying to alter both her circumstances and social injustice. Individuals might have been engaged in various reasons in the suffrage activities; it is intriguing what motivations the individuals held.

My favorite scene is when Miriam challenges men who are calling the five sisters all kinds of names while they are petitioning Moses to allow them to inherit their father’s land. She was told by Serakh not to be conspicuous but to be dedicated as a messenger behind the scene. However, her sense of justice was too strong to keep such a promise. She seems reckless, but her brave encouraged the sisters, who used to be hopeless, and eventually changed history and recorded in the Old Testament. It is thrilling because Miriam did a job that people want to do but cannot due to lacking courage.

Miriam lives in the parallel world; she lives back and forth between her era and the biblical time. Although she was originally led to the past to save the misfortune sisters, she is also inspired by them who are fighting an irrational law: “only sons can inherit their father’s land. If the man had only daughters, the land is seized by the tribe.” When she backed in her era, she tried to contribute the suffrage activities by doing as much as she could: printing six thousand copies of the “vote for justice” cards. To operate this project secretly, she paid big sacrifices, such as a serious injury on her hand and dismissal of Kirsten, the only female employee in the print shop. The cards were torn and thrown to her face by men immediately after she distributed in the suffrage campaign on the Election Day. Nevertheless, she did not give up, thinking about the sisters who were under much worse conditions than her but overcame their destiny and changed the society. I like this climax; Miriam’s maturity shows us how to manage adversary situations and keep our motivations.

I expected that, as the sisters did, Miriam would succeed in convincing her father and begin working for his printing shop. However, the conclusion is not this mediocre. She decided to leave her parents, move to a new place, and seek jobs for a printing shop. She is much more matured than I expected. I am proud of her since she did not just follow the sister’s precedent. Instead, she found her way that suits her environment and capability by herself.

As a YA novel, the book does good job to let the target readers empathize with the protagonist. She is an average girl but stuck stubbornly to her object and justice even if it made her relationship with her parents worse. Such her attitudes, carrying through her convictions, are a significantly important aspect in life, so she plays a role model for teen agers.

This story also helps young people improve political apathy. Since people take it for granted that they are automatically granted vote for rights when they reach a certain age, they tend to forget the bloody efforts made by predecessors. This book reminds the worth of voting rights in natural way, so young people may voluntarily realize it after reading.

Through this story, I learned that leaving comfortable zones made people dramatically strong, so we, especially young people, should not be afraid of challenging situations because they are the initiation into adulthood.

Blue Thread is a historical YA novel that explores the possibility of a magical prayer shawl linking biblical characters with people of more contemporary times. This volume follows a young suffragette and the movement’s connection with the daughters of Zelophehad’s having asked for their inheritance thousands of years in the past. There is time travel.

I went into reading this without realizing that it had a biblical-fantasy element to it, so I was a little thrown when I got to that point. I felt like the main story could have carried itself well enough without the forays into the past; the personal conflicts the main character deals with in the context of the larger struggle for suffrage made for interesting and compelling reading, even if the author did try a little too hard to ground it in Portland (the most annoying thing about that being that it’s a version of Portland that no longer exists). The scenes in the ancient past seemed muffled and inconsequential, even when the protagonist was in danger, and I only cared about her trips insofar as they affected her present once she returned.

Despite my complaints, I don’t feel like the story’s premise is necessarily terrible; the writing itself is good, and I’d probably be writing a very different review if I’d researched it more carefully before reading. I just don’t like it when a story seems fine as-is and then something supernatural happens partway through to completely change its course, even though it was probably unnecessary in terms of intrigue for the reader (the other book I immediately think of that did this is Rose Madder). It’s not a bad book by any stretch—again, the writing is solid, and the main plot is compelling—but if you go into it without knowing all the different genres it fall into, you might be disappointed. ( )

Like any teenager, Mim struggles to balance the expectations of her traditional parents with her own budding ambitions. At sixteen, she is expected to turn her attention toward finding a fitting mate, someone worthy of marriage. Mim’s priorities, however, lie in an entirely different set of goals; she wants to gain expertise in her father’s business (printing) so that she might one day run his company. Unable to understand why the fact that she is a girl should exclude her from this future, Mim simply does not accept the boundaries. On her own, she studies printing, determinedly works her way into spending time at the print shop, and develops relationships with the workers there in order to further her unrelenting pursuit of knowledge. Mim is looking for a way to change her destiny.

As the Suffrage Movement gains momentum in 1912 Portland, OR, Mim finds herself drawn to the effort and finds voice for her internal independence. During this period of personal exploration, Mim is visited by a strange woman, from a faraway place and, it turns out, a long-ago time. Not only does the early twentieth century women’s movement need her support, but Mim discovers that she has a unique purpose in life, in that she is the rightful owner of a magical prayer shawl that allows her to time travel to help other women who are also fighting for social justice.

What is most appealing about the protagonist, however, is that she is not merely engaged in rebellion, as normal as that may be; she is thoughtful, intelligent, and driven by a strong moral compass. The notion that women should have equal rights is not revolutionary to Mim—it is simply right. Mim is courageous, independent, and full of love and hope for her friends and family. Not only does Blue Thread highlight the tenacity and bravery of those dedicated to women’s rights movements throughout time, the book also weaves the excitement of time travel and a pinch of magic into the touching narrative. This is a worthwhile read, and Mim is exactly the kind of female protagonist that should be in more YA novels. ( )