I liked that story just fine - although it’s a very white, very heteronormative view of the issues - but I didn’t vibe with the central relationship between Effie, an exhausted maid, and the self-improving elf, Lord Blackthorn. In Ten Thousand Stitches, we meet hardworking housemaid Euphemia Reeves, who toils day and night to do the bidding of the awful Lady Culver. This theme goes hand-in-hand with the theme of just how demoralizing it is as a servant to have your best quality revolve around being unseen. This is why Effie feels such inordinate relief when she leaves the house with Lord Blackthorn and feels the sun on her skin.

So, if Miss Buxley doesn't catch herself a husband, her choices are a 100 to 1 chance at landing a miserable life as a governess, ending up on the streets/prostitution, or marrying an old man and hopefully at least ending up with a house of her own. For all reviews, the source of the book I’m reviewing is identified in the details section at the start of the review.But having this book set from the perspective of a maid showed more of the downstairs viewpoints than the first novel did. This HIT as a person in my mid-twenties, burned out, aimless, and disillusioned with the prospect of working until I die. The tone reminded me a lot of one of my favorite childhood books, THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH, in the way that absurd situations are treated with upmost seriousness, and abstract concepts are frequently manifested in concrete ways. As a housemaid, Effie has resigned herself to a life of invisibility, only noticeable to the very few for her fine embroidery work. As a housemaid for the gentleman in question, Effie is out of luck on how to proceed, but when she finds herself drawn into the faerie realm of Lord Blackthorn, she finds an unexpected solution.

For the greatest obstacle to Effie’s happiness might well prove to be Lord Blackthorn's overwhelmingly good intentions. When Lady Culver learns that a rival now has French maids, she decrees that her own maids must be French too, and promptly gives them all new names.

When we meet her at the start of the book she’s quite downtrodden, is unhappy being a servant and she sees it as a thankless job especially because she’s not appreciated by the family she works for. While I found the plot to be a bit boring and meandering for large parts, and then quite rushed in the end, I still think it accomplished exactly what it set out to do. Ten Thousand Stitches has the same charm, heart, and cleverness, but the plot holds together better, all the way through to the end. I think it’s this ability of the author to comment on important social issues but still keep the whimsy and fun intact in the story is what has impressed me the most. He has a very small moment in HALF A SOUL, where he talks to Dora about what makes someone virtuous, which sets him on his path in this book.

This perception is mostly why male and female servants were separated into different sleeping areas, why servants had almost no expectation of privacy, and why employers punished perceived moral slights as though they had parental authority. This book might be set in the Regency era, but it’s hard to imagine Atwater didn’t have more contemporary examples and frustrations in mind, as anger so all-consuming is rarely aimed in the right direction. And there's a lovely thematic thread about anger: how one person's anger can "infect" others, and how in situations of oppression, shared collective anger can actually be a good thing. Regency era servants (and servants as far back as the medieval era) often used nursery rhymes to time their tasks.He offers her a bargain: he will help her become a lady and win Lord Benedict’s heart, and she in turn will embroider a coat with ten thousand stitches. Really, what makes a Cinderella story stand out to me is when Cinderella and her prince have more than 10 seconds to get to know one another.

With the author's smart but funny writing, we get to see the plight of the people who work in such households and have no status, how their invisibility is considered their best quality, any wrongs done unto them have no consequences for the perpetrators but they are really powerless to do much about it. Not getting mad in general, but in getting properly outraged about injustices – and then doing something about it, whether it is standing up for yourself or banding together with others to demand reform.I liked this focused on a maid in Regency England, as that almost never happens, and I did life the "social justice" undertones. For every hour Effie spends as a lady, she must add a stitch to an embroidered jacket for Lord Blackthorn. It was more that some of the more childish aspects of his faerie self played at conflict with the adult romance he was also supposed to be within. Like Half A Soul, Olivia Atwater’s unique and witty regency retelling of Cinderella was charming and throughly unique, delving into issues surrounding social justice whilst exploring anger, virtue, happiness, and love.