Thread by Thread
By Alice Brière-Haquet
Illustrated by Michaela Eccli
Translated by Sarah Ardizzone
Imprint: Eerdmans Books for Young readers
Publication date: February 18, 2025
Reviewed by Genevieve Chornenki
Tink and frog are words that knitters quickly learn. In knitter’s language, the words signify a mistake; we undo our work to correct an error or oversight. Back we go. We unravel stitches voluntarily, albeit reluctantly. But what if our knitting unravelled spontaneously? Or was rent by forces beyond our control? How unsettling might that be?
For author Alice Brière-Haquet and her illustrator Michela Eccli, knitting is a metaphor. With knits and purls, they invite readers into the disruption of forced migration.
A family of mice lives happily in a seed stitch house of sturdy red yarn, girded with a 7 mm needle. All is well. “Knit one, purl one.” The rhythm is familiar and comfortable—until the house begins to unravel, one stitch at a time. The foundation starts to disappear. “Oh, no—there goes another stitch.” And another. And another. “Until it’s time to run.”
Yarn and coloured-pencil drawings move readers through the experiences of a displaced family. The mice escape down a stairway of kinked, unravelled yarn. They run past a dragon breathing fiery orange fibres. They brave outsized waves, clinging to a knitting needle with crudely cast on stitches.
Eventually, the mice reach land populated by unfamiliar creatures where they scavenge yarn in colours and fibres not seen before. Slowly, slowly, with the help of strangers, using “threads of ourselves…spools of worry” and bits of new yarn, they knit themselves a new seed stitch house. Its colours are novel, except for a partial row of red stitches near the foundation.
The story concludes with the mice in a home where they can be themselves.
Thread by Thread tells a gentle and optimistic tale of migration where safety and joy are only tinged with sorrow. It is a book intended for young readers of tender disposition. So, houses unravel over time; they’re not blasted to rubble in an instant. A migrant family bobs on a knitting needle in the waves but arrives safe and dry; their overloaded boat doesn’t capsize in open water. And the members who leave the red seed-stitched house resettle whole and hopeful in a welcoming community. Such subtlety makes Thread by Thread a charming read for young children and a sensitive introduction to what adults, knitters and non-knitters, must recognize as a challenging contemporary issue.
