Product Description

For Eveleen Hardcastle life gets no better than growing up on Pear Tree Farm in the Lincolnshire countryside. Her family works hard for the Dunsmore estate and Eveleen finds it impossible to resist the charms of their employer's son, Stephen Dunsmore. But Jimmy, ever quick to antagonize, ensures that his sister's clandestine trysts do not remain so for long.

Mary Hardcastle reacts to the news of her daughter's affair with a shocking ferocity, which seems to be borm more of bitterness than maternal protectiveness. But what is it that fuels Mary's resentment towards her daughter? Unable to ignore her own feelings, Eveleen continues to meet Stephen in secret. But deception has a cruel price to pay when her beloved father is found dead from a heard attack. And worse yet, Stephen, far from providing Eveleen with the comfort she craves, deserts her in her hour of need and callously evicts the Hardcastles from the farm.

Suddenly homeless, Eveleen is left to take the family reins and she fights to make a new life for her family in Nottinghamshire. And then she makes a stunning discovery about her mother's past which changes all their lives for ever...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #121742 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-10
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

Review
Although the work is hard Eveleen loves her life on a Lincolnshire farm with her parents and brother and the attentions of the son of the family's employer provide a welcome distraction. But there are heartbreaks ahead and Eveleen resolves never to allow love to enter her heart again - until she makes a stunning discovery.

About the Author
Born in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, Margaret Dickinson moved to the coast at the age of seven and so began her love for the sea and the Lincolnshire landscape. She is the author of fifteen novels, including her Lincolnshire Fleethaven trilogy and most recently The Tulip Girl and The River Folk. Married with two grown-up daughters, Margaret Dickinson combines a busy working life with her writing career.

Customer Reviews

***** book
I havnt enjoyed a book like this in a long time! A thoroughly gripping book about love, family and of course hidden secrets!Eveleen is such a strong character who is determined to succeed Magaret Dickinson made an excellent job. I would reccomend this book to anyone who loves a can't-put-it-down book!

A Spell binding read
This is not the kind of book I would normally read, but been stuck in a quiet period at work there was nothing else to do so I started to read the first few pages.

My typical book choice would be a fantasty or a Crime Thriller so I really didn't expect much, how wrong could I be?

Within the first few pages I was hooked, the book is so well written and very engaging. I truely cared about the characters, laughing, crying and shouting along with them.

I finished the book in two days and am now going to buy the sequal, a wholely unexpected but gratefully welcomed addition to my reading list!

Whatever your taste I reccommend you read this book and get in touch with true humanity. :)

Two Heroines
Book Review: " Tangled Threads" by Margaret Dickinson.

The heroine of this soothing and mainly predictable romantic novel is a beautiful (of course), young country girl, Eveleen, who successfully emerges hopeful, and cleverly virginal, from sexual oppression by the squire's son and from the trauma of being driven from her tied home. Eveleen nobly takes responsibility for her mother and her feckless brother on their journey, first to work for a hypocrite of a "Christian" Uncle and thence to the Dark Satanic Mills of Victorian and Edwardian Nottingham. The mother, Mary is driven temporarily witless by her husband's death and the consequent removal of the family from their tied holding and becomes yet another burden for the youthful heroine. By pure chance, Eveleen finds work in a factory which turns out to be owned by the handsome (of course) old flame of her mother's, who might have been her (illegitimate) father. Fortunately for Eveleen and the story line, it turns out not to be so, because the old flame's son, Mr Richard, is equally handsome, dark, and presumably, heir to his father's successful business, and naturally, he falls in love, on sight, with Eveleen. He becomes her knight in shining armour and moves tactfully but inevitably to protect and save her from her several tribulations. Despite her brother James getting her cousin Rebecca pregnant and running away to sea, at last, everything ends with prospects of happiness all round, except for poor old Dad, who died early in the saga, and Rebecca who dies in childbirth leaving Eveleen with the baby. I found the author's ploy of keeping Eveleen pure, yet making her a mother by proxy, ingenious, amusing, but touchingly realistic for the times portrayed.

What takes this novel out of the run-of -the-mill is the extraordinarily well-researched detail of the small world the characters lived and worked in. The second hero(ine) is the Ruddington Framework Knitters Museum,on which Eveleen's Uncle's framework shops and home are precisely based. This real background lifted the whole saga into vivid reality, and after the formulaic early pages, I was enthralled. There are echoes of Pride and Prejudice, but set in a lower stratum of society and with a less cerebral, but equally complex and fascinating set of characters.

Margaret Dickinson is a very experienced and popular writer and is generally very readable and enjoyable; particularly so in this case. The amount of research that went into this book is evident, but not gratingly obvious; knitted into the pattern of the story faultlessly.

Tangled Threads will contrast and complement nicely the stock of more weighty academic and factual publications held by the Museum. Margaret Dickinson's imagination has populated the Museum site with lively and romantic characters. Eveleen promises to become a local heroine of some note in the book's sequel, "Twisted Strands".

Despite an ingrained aversion to the genre, I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and can recommend it to anyone even slightly interested in the cottage industry era, the Ruddington Framework Knitters Museum in its hey-day, or a very satisfying novel.