The plot is fairly simple, which I don’t mind. The problem is when you have a simple plot, you need to make the characters compelling, touching on human emotions. So you have something to grasp onto. Otherwise, the story feels flat.

LoveReading4Kids exists because books change lives, and buying books through LoveReading4Kids means you get to change the lives of future generations, with 25% of the cover price donated to schools in need. Join our community to get personalised book suggestions, extracts straight to your inbox, 10% off RRPs, and to change children’s lives. Violet is one of the so-called “surplus women” created by the war’s casualties and the resulting gender imbalance. It’s a stigma that smarts every time a stranger shoots a glance at her naked ring finger; she feels it still more acutely in the drab struggle to support herself. A typist for an insurance firm, her salary is “rather like a pair of ill-fitting shoes that could be worn, but that pinched and rubbed and left calluses”. She’s often starving. You’ll hear echoes of the estimable Barbara Pym as Violet’s heels clip across the cathedral’s inner close Other synchronization APIs include condition variables, critical sections, semaphores, and monitors. When it became clear that Mrs. Speedwell was not going to see her off as she normally did, watching from the doorway until visitors were out of sight, Violet went over and kissed her on the forehead. “Good‑bye, Mother,” she murmured. “I’ll see you next Sunday.” I like the gentle humour and there are some lovely and absurd stories that are so ridiculously English - eccentricity coming fairly easy! There are moments of menace too and Violet shows just how self possessed she could be at times of threat. Society of the time is well depicted too especially peoples attitudes to same sex relationships and unmarried mothers although some characters refuse to bow to the conventions of the day. There is unrequited love but healing too as Violet is able to move on from her losses and in her own inimitable way finds solace. The ending of the book is lovely and optimistic albeit with the spectre of Hitler hanging over the world.Violet’s determination to make something for the Cathedral, something that could bring comfort to others and would probably outlast her, a way to leave her mark for posterity, makes sense. I found the overall descriptions of the broderers’ work and meetings interesting though at times the minute details of the stitches dragged a bit. Still when I explored on the internet and saw some of the actual handiwork that the real Louisa Pesel and the women of the Guild made, it all came together and I marveled at the time and care spent making such beautiful things. The women of the story all seemed so real complete with their gossiping about their lives, silent examination of each other (Violet is right, women are much harder on each other than men are), and determination to maintain their hierarchy in the group. But just as the Cathedral has always been the heartbeat of Winchester, it becomes the focus of Violet's new life. She inquires about the embroidering being done over the years by a group of women embellishing the kneelers, cushions, and alms bags with their works of art. Louisa Pesel (a real life individual) takes her under her wing and soon Violet is creating impressive work herself. Violet did not hate men, and had not been entirely man‑free. Two or three times a year, she had put on her best dress—copper lamé in a scallop pattern—gone alone to a Southampton hotel bar, and sat with a sherry and a cigarette until someone took interest. Her “sherry men,” she called them. Sometimes they ended up in an alley or a motorcar or a park; never in his room, certainly not at her parents’. To be desired was welcome, though she did not feel the intense pleasure from the encounters that she once had with Laurence during the Perseids. Her brother was gone, her fiancé was gone, God was gone.

Although she revels in her independence in Winchester, she's living hand to mouth, freezing in her bedsit, missing meals to afford a few cigarettes and a weekly trip to the cinema. She is a typist in an insurance office, where her two other younger colleagues put in half-hearted days, just waiting for marriage to take them out of the workplace to become wives and mothers. Her move to Winchester last November had been sudden. After her father’s death Violet had limped along for a year and half, living alone with her mother. It was expected of women like her—unwed and unlikely to—to look after their parents. She had done her best, she supposed. But Mrs. Speedwell was impossible; she always had been, even before the loss of her eldest son, George, in the war. She was from an era when daughters were dutiful and deferential to their mothers, at least until they married and deferred to their husbands—not that Mrs. Speedwell had ever deferred much to hers. When they were children, Violet and her brothers had avoided their mother’s attention, playing together as a tight gang run with casual authority by George. Violet was often scolded by Mrs. Speedwell for not being feminine enough. “You’ll never get a husband with scraped knees and flyaway hair and being mad about books,” she declared. Little did she know that when the war came along, there would be worse things than books and scrapes to keep Violet from finding a husband. What depressed her even more than the complaints themselves was that she had counted them. Violet inadvertently walks into the Winchester Cathedral during a ceremony for the “broderers” and is taken with the embroidered kneelers. I was not and the first part of the book was a trudge for me. I was bored. I kept reading, though, because I admired how Violet asserted her independence and moves away from her constantly complaining mother. I felt for her - alone and barely making enough for room and breakfast, frequently skipping a meal and still after years is grieving the loss of her fiance, her brother in the Great War. She was considered one of “Surplus Women “. (Surplus women is a phrase coined during the Industrial Revolution referring to a perceived excess of unmarried women in Britain.” Wikipedia). The middle part of the book was better and I liked the descriptions of the bell ringing and Violet’s growing relationships . While I get what Chevalier seems to be portraying here, the challenges of these women in society in general, the workplace and even in their families, the delivery of the story fell short for me, felt a bit contrived at times. In spite of this, I think it’s worthy of three stars because as I mentioned I admired Violet and some of the other women in the broderers group, and their coming together in friendship made for a good ending. Thank you to the team at LoveReading UK, for sending me a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. Lower resource consumption of threads: using threads, an application can operate using fewer resources than it would need when using multiple processes.A Single Thread by Jennifer Chevalier is a slow moving novel about a woman in 1932 who loses her brother and finance in WW1. At the time she lived with her mother who became angry and bitter. She moves on to Winchester in a life of being single where she takes on embroidery and meets a bell ringer in a large Cathedral Multithreading is mainly found in multitasking operating systems. Multithreading is a widespread programming and execution model that allows multiple threads to exist within the context of one process. These threads share the process's resources, but are able to execute independently. The threaded programming model provides developers with a useful abstraction of concurrent execution. Multithreading can also be applied to one process to enable parallel execution on a multiprocessing system. She’s also exhausted from clashing with her mother and finally sets out on her own – though this causes a dust-up with mother and upsets what her family expected of her. Life on her own is hard and she’s barely able to afford to eat but I found myself admiring Violet. She’s got gumption yet is also achingly vulnerable at times. On her own and surviving now, she knows she still faces struggles and uncertainty in the future. Maiden aunts are no more embraced then than they were over a hundred years previously and Violet worries. What will happen to her when she’s old? “A spinster’s uncertainty underlined everything she did.”

One of Violet’s steps to gain independence is to leave home --- which means leaving her mother alone. When Mrs. Speedwell falls ill, Violet comes home to take care of her and is expected, as the unmarried daughter, to continue to be her mother’s caretaker. Violet is able to come up with a creative solution which works well for the family as well as her friends --- but the burden to do so fell entirely on her. What did you think of this being solely Violet’s responsibility? How did you feel about Tom’s response? Should he have stepped in to help or should he have offered a solution himself? The visions of Winchester Cathedral came alive and of course I had to search out more of those, too, as well as bell ringing of which I knew little. Now I can understand the meaning behind “ringing a peal” over someone! The story is grounded in life as these characters would have seen it with no unbelievable hints of what was, unfortunately, to come. The growing concerns about Germany are touched on but just a bit in terms of what would have been heard on the wireless or read in newspapers. Smallest sequence of programmed instructions that can be managed independently by a scheduler A process with two threads of execution, running on one processor Program vs. Process vs. Thread Britain lost an estimated two percent of its population during World War I. It sounds insignificant, but that loss represented a generation of men who would have otherwise been wage-earners, husbands and fathers. In the wake of their loss was a generation of women who were left without fathers, brothers, husbands and co-parents. Tracy Chevalier's elegant, delicate and deeply moving A Single Thread traces one of the many who were known as "surplus women" and how their pattern of loss wove into British society in the years between the wars.That’s enough of such talk,” Evelyn replied. A brisk brunette, she was used to Mrs. Speedwell, and Violet admired how efficiently she had learned to shut down her mother‑in‑law. It was always easier when you weren’t related. She had sorted out Tom as well, after the war. Violet appreciated her sister‑in‑law but was a little too intimidated to be true friends with her. “Come, give your Auntie Violet a kiss good‑bye. Then we’ll go down to the shops while Daddy drives her to Winchester.” MA in creative writing, University of East Anglia, Norwich, England, 1994. There’s a lot of debate about whether or not you can be taught to write. Why doesn’t anyone ask that of professional singers, painters, dancers? That year forced me to write all the time and take it seriously. I warmed to Violet for her efforts to do good, such as the attention she pays to her niece Marjory or her attempts to help her fellow broderers, Gilda and Dorothy, even if her efforts do not always succeed. And I applauded her desire for independence (a 'life of sorts', The Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) for the language Haskell uses lightweight threads which are scheduled on operating system threads. World War I has left her bereft after the loss of her eldest brother, George, and fiancé Laurence. With the recent death of her beloved father, Violet feels one loss too many. Without her father to be the buffer between Violet and her mother, Violet is desperate to get away and discover a new life for herself.