Unravelling

Unravelling, a novel written by Elizabeth Graver is the a captivating story of Aimee Slater, a young girl growing up in the rough, uncompromising world of 1840s New England.  Gentility was for the wealthy.  Hardscrabble was for the farmers, factory workers and main population.

Aimee is born into a farming family in New Hampshire.  There are five siblings and her parents living in the small house.  Her sister Anna is buried in the family plot in the church yard.  Her father keeps chickens, pigs and farms the land.  Aimee always feels different from her sisters and brothers, that her name stands out from the familiar names of her siblings, that her name was similar to her mother's but a fancier version.  She tells the reader, "I was the girl who might go bad, who needed to hear the warning bedtime stories,  right from the beginning, but my mother seemed to love me best.
Then I thought myself the most deserving of her love - I was, after all the prettiest of her children and the quickest at school."  this need for acceptance and craving for attention and love plague Aimee throughout her life.  These needs get into the trouble she finds and the frustration and anguish she can never escape.

Aimee feels trapped in her small town, stifled by life on the farm.  She feels different than the other children she is growing up with.  After her friend writes to her from the Mills she feels the tug of a life in the larger world.

She goes off to the Lowell Mills at a time when young girls were convinced to go to work in the harshest of elements and work conditions.  She is young and alone trying to negotiate a world beyond her experience.  When things go wrong, her family, who she desperately needs to reach out to her, pushes her away.  This was a typical reaction of families at this time period .  This novel is written in the very stylized vocabulary of the time period and is very realistic to the behavior of the people at that time to the circumstances of a young girl in trouble.

Graver writes so wonderfully capturing the dialog and conversation style of the period and also the feelings of the townspeople and the parents toward anyone who was different. the descriptions were so vivid that you feel like you are in Aimee's shoes and living the experiences with her.  Or sometimes I felt like I was there with her as her friend and wanted to shout; don't go down that path.

Told in the first person as an account of her life looking back from the end to how it all happened, Aimee is trying to come to terms with where she has ended up and make peace with herself , her mother and the make the best of the life she has been dealt.