When Ruby and Sally were born, their parents disagreed about their names – the first of many fights about how they should  raise their daughters. Jan has a ‘substantial list of rules for decency and morality’ (including bans on red lipstick and boys), while their ‘pacifist’ father loves the simplicity of a Friday night with popcorn and Fred Astaire. Soon after the girls’ thirteenth birthdays, their parents divorce. Jan takes Sally to start a new life with the fearsome Aberdeen Church in Darwin, while Ruby stays with her father in Melbourne, where she dreams of dressmaking.

Brisbane-based Belinda Jeffrey’s sweet Young Adult novel follows threads begun in Brown Skin Blue (2009) and Big River, Little Fish (2010) and continues her sympathy for teenage characters facing abandonment and loss, surrounded and comforted by nature. Jeffrey has created a strange, sad family where distance isn’t the only threat to the girls’ happiness.

In One Long Thread, Jeffrey’s prose occasionally suffers from narration that is too obvious, too expositional for clever Ruby. The best moments are those after Ruby flees Darwin and heads to Tonga. There she reunites with her grandmother Pearl, whose story of the red coat provides the inspiration for the gorgeous first chapter of the novel. Together they care for Pearl’s thousands of silkworms that sound like ‘steady, thumping rain’ beneath the roof of the shed. Here Ruby’s next stages in life begin to take shape. Ruby grieves, makes decisions about love, and starts to imagine where these new threads might take her.