Hanging by a Thread is a YA paranormal mystery by Sophie Littlefield.Clare Knight has recently moved back to her childhood town of Winston, along with her Mom, just in time for summer.
Only problem is that July 4th is a dreaded holiday in Winston – everyone is hoping and praying it won’t be like the last two where someone has gone missing or ended up dead…
Trying not to worry too much about it, Clare’s enjoying her new business she’s running with her best friend where they sell her redesigned vintage clothing.
But Clare has an ability she doesn’t share with others – when she touches certain pieces of clothing she can sometimes see glimpses into their pasts.
So when she stumbles across a beaten up denim jacket and gets a vivid, startling vision of violence and fear, Clare is suddenly much more involved in the disappearance of Amanda Stavros, the girl who went missing the previous Fourth of July…
I spent a lot of my younger reading years gorging on Joan Lowery Nixon and her excellent YA murder mysteries. I’ve always been a fan of a good, solid mystery – with a decent, likable sleuth. So, I was looking forward to Hanging by a Thread – thought it might bring me a little nostalgia.
Sadly, it did not.
Initially, Clare comes off as a little self-important but I hung in there because it was (at first) fast-paced and there was a mystery to be had!
Unfortunately, the mystery part of the novel was drowned in continual descriptions of sewing, ripping up old clothes, and paragraphs of seemingly pointless drivel.
And Clare never got better, to me she got worse. Her character was wishy-washy in her pursuits and harsh to her mother without much provocation, which I couldn’t excuse. She was just not sympathetic at all, and for some reason the author wanted to keep having her yammer on and on about herself, her love of fashion, etc. For me, that was boring and kind of annoying.
You practically forgot it was a mystery until occasional instances would bring it up again. We get a few psychic visions that are muddled in their execution, in my opinion, and a LOT of cliché-ridden romantic tension with the bad boy in town.
Please remember that you might love it – and if you are a sewing enthusiast you might adore those pages of details – but for me it all seemed so out of place. By the time the mystery was resolved, which I did indeed correctly guess, I was ready to move on to another book.
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