Thursday, June 9, 2011

The Twisted Thread by Charlotte Bacon


         Claire Harkness is the girl that all the guys want and all the girls want to be—until now.  Starting with a death on a prestigious campus would lead one to believe this would be a compelling murder mystery, but it sadly was not.
         Armitage Academy’s newest English teacher/intern, Madeline Christopher is the only character with any real depth.  As the predominate narrator and an “outsider” we slowly begin to understand the upper crust boarding school with its eccentric faculty and even more peculiar traditions.  Madeline is a bit of a hippy in a world of perfectly polished prep students.   She is a character that, despite her flaws, or maybe because of them, has worth. 
         The novel actually loses steam when it returns to the murder investigation.  Each time the murder investigation is brought back into the picture we take a look into Armitage’s past, specifically the female students with their “twisted” traditions.  The girls come across as superficial, which goes with the stereotype, but there are moments when the author tries to humanize them and it falls flat.  The chapters dedicated to the faculty are also unnecessary, they do not temp the reader into believing any of them are a suspect either. 
         The Twisted Thread is not a novel about a murder, but rather a novel about social classes.  When the author focuses on these societal differences between the haves and the have nots it flourishes, when the murder comes back into the plot it begins to stray.  The only time the discussion of the murder truly takes a hold of the reader is when former Armitage student and current local detective Matt Corelli meets Madeline. 
         This book was a decent and a quick read, but too many characters and subplots make this thread unwind.   

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