In a scene in Joanna Volavka’s Threadwalkers, our heroine, sixteen-year-old Miranda Woodward, notices a book in her bookcase has been turned around with its pages facing out. The volume in question is, quite appropriately, Madeleine L’engle’s time travel classic, A Wrinkle in Time. Threadwalkers also features an absent father, a girl who doesn’t quite fit in, and a decidedly odd cast of individuals who can time travel. But while A Wrinkle in Time (which, by the by, I think is overrated) abstracts itself to distant planets and Black Things, Volavka’s novel is firmly grounded here on Earth.
Miranda begins the novel walking through a corn maze with friends — a metaphor for the sense of disorientation we all experience as teens. Her father was killed in a plane crash six months earlier, and she sometimes hears voices that aren’t in the room, but for the most part she’s your typical anxious, fun-loving adolescent with just a dash of angst. Until she comes home from school one day to find her cat Perkins has been replaced by a different cat. Then her friends pretend they don’t know her. When her mother disappears, and her school doesn’t have any record of her attending, it’s apparent some very outré forces are at work.
A card she discovers in her father’s wallet leads Miranda to a tailor’s shop called Stitch in Time Tailoring. This Tailor, however, fixes more than fabrics.
Snags and Editors
While Threadwalkers contains a lot of your typical young adult tropes—there’s even a haunted house Miranda visits with her friends on her birthday—the time travel aspect is ingenious and original. As the Tailor explains to Miranda:
“Many, many years ago, there was a group of people who postulated that the universe was, in fact, very much like a fabric. It could bend and twist and fold and tear, and was made up of many threads.”
A Snag in one of these threads, if found, could allow a person to travel (or Walk) into the past or future. Miranda is one of the few born with the gift of seeing a Snag, and so is able to Walk into another time:
She flung herself through the back door, pulled it closed behind her, and ducked beneath the kitchen window. She heard someone turn on the kitchen faucet. Her head spun, but she fought off the queasiness and went around the side of the house, crouching to stay below the windows. As she turned the corner, she saw it. Hanging in the air, just behind the living room window, as a Snag. The little tendrils of gold sparkled in the afternoon sunlight.
And she’ll need to do a bit of Walking to put her life in order. It turns out a group of Walkers gone bad, known as Editors, are intentionally changing Miranda’s timeline for their own sinister purposes. Volavka doesn’t reveal whether each of their Edits spawns an alternate universe, or whether a single universe is somehow being transformed. But interestingly, Miranda remembers her life before the edits, while all of the “normal” people around her don’t seem to be aware anything has changed.
Bald Guys with Motorcycles
In some ways Threadwalkers resembles another classic young adult novel with time travel motifs: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Both stories present a secret world overlaid on everyday reality. Walkers, however, seem to live more in the mainstream world than wizards, while the Editors are little more than cardboard cutout bad guys—one of them is a bald man who drives a motorcycle, shadowing Miranda as she searches for clues to who has been rearranging her life. Most of the action takes place in everyday settings like cemeteries, campgrounds, city streets and airports. And the Tailor’s shop is not exactly a magic castle:
Miranda pulled into a little strip mall and parked her car in front of the shop marked “TAILOR.” The “IL” flickered in the middle of the faded, red sign, its neon lights buzzing like cicadas in the distance on a summer afternoon. The other shops looked closed with plywood nailed over their windows and muddled graffiti across their doors. The only other place with lights on was a convenience store on the right-hand side of the strip. The whole place felt melancholic, as if it was holding onto the last vestiges of life that sputtered and blinked in the old signs.
But this sense of grounded reality only makes the time travel aspect of the story more fantastical. The plot does get a bit muddled with Miranda’s various travels. (Wait, is she in the past now? And how many days or months?) And the narrative is busy with intricate details about Miranda grabbing her backpack or checking her phone. Still, Threadwalkers is a heartfelt, delightful read, mainly due to Miranda’s open, questioning character. And dammit, you gotta find out if she gets her cat back again!
Follow the Golden Thread
Edging dangerously on fifty, it’s probably an understatement to say that I’m not within Threadwalkers’ intended audience demographic. Nonetheless I’d give a rousing thumbs up to the novel, as I think most time travel readers would. While the themes of the novel—the sense of living the wrong life, of not knowing what’s really going on, of being isolated from friends and others and having to reinvent and rearrange yourself—apply particularly to adolescence, adults of all ages can identify with them. After all, you don’t have to be a young adult to enjoy young adult fiction. And you don’t need to be a time traveler to have your friends suddenly pretend they don’t know you.
Perhaps the most potent symbol in Threadwalkers is a spool of golden thread Miranda is given, a last gift from her father, and something that only she seems able to see. Its true purpose is unknown (until the end of the book, that is) but as the story weaves its spell, the metaphorical significance isn’t hard to puzzle out: only you can know the direction your life should take, and only you can fix it.
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