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The Ninth Day The Blue Thread Saga Ruth Tenzer Feldman Books

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The Ninth Day The Blue Thread Saga Ruth Tenzer Feldman Books

The Ninth Day is the second novel in Feldman’s Blue Thread saga, which chronicles the continuing adventures of a Jewish bloodline whose women can travel through time with the use of a magic shawl and a time traveling ancestor named Serakh. Much like in Blue Thread, Miriam Hope, a teenage girl in 1960s Berkeley, gets caught up in the social cause of the time period — free speech on college campuses. Her life is complicated by typical teenager problems such as school, drugs, a stutter, and figuring out how to save a baby whose father wants to kill it because a vision told him to do it.

Unfortunately, The Ninth Day suffers from the same issues as its predecessor. It attempts to include too many different components — coming-of-age, history, religion, drug use, freedom of speech, and time travel — and fails to sufficiently explore any of them. While the Miriam in Blue Thread saw her suffrage battle paralleled in the fight for property rights in biblical times, the connection here is even more tenuous. Miriam Hope travels through time because of her experience with LSD, which is a weak impetus for the character’s actions.

The author’s, and Miriam’s, opinion of LSD is confusing. It feels primarily demonized, but then Miriam also uses it to solve the narrative’s central conflict. Her reaction to the realization of the events that surround the cause of her stutter are also nonsensical and unsatisfying. The act of drugging another person isn’t given the emotional weight it deserves. LSD is billed as an important part of Miriam’s backstory and the central conflict, but she doesn’t act like a normal person in regards to it.

It seems unwise to have built the conflict’s solution around a hallucinogenic drug. It works out mostly because it just so happens to work out. The same can be said of the time traveling aspects. There are few answers to how and why it works, and the fact that even Serakh doesn’t get it is frustrating. Things happen because “The One” wills them to happen, and that’s that.

The child that Miriam is forced to save also lacks significance in terms of the narrative. The events that give rise to the conflict surrounding the child likely happened to many families, but “The One” specifically dictates that this child is the one she should save. Miriam is only allowed to save this one child, which made me think the child had a special role to play, but nothing about the child is ever revealed. It makes me wonder why “The One” chose to save this child instead of the thousands of believers who died in a genocide prior to these events.

The Ninth Day’s setting doesn’t especially work either. The backdrop to the story is the freedom of speech protests in Berkeley, but that doesn’t have much to do with LSD, Miriam, or her journey. Miriam gets roped into these protests, but their importance feels like a footnote in the overall narrative, which is frustrating because of how much of the novel is devoted to them.

While Miriam is written as a strong and empowered woman, her hypocritical actions belie her role as a social justice warrior. She fails to correct the injustices within her own life, which could be chocked up to forgiveness, but forgiveness isn’t justice. She can travel through time to right the wrongs of the past, but inexplicably can’t do the same in her own time. It’s an unsatisfying conclusion to a inconsistent story.

Feldman has chosen an interesting time period for her coming-of-age tale, but again fails to capitalize upon it. Her decision to focus on time traveling and LSD instead of her characters and their setting once again results in an inconsistent narrative full of questions and inexplicable events. If Feldman chooses to keep the time traveling component in a future novel in this saga, she might need another hundred pages or so to fully explore each component and what each means to her protagonist.


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The Ninth Day The Blue Thread Saga Ruth Tenzer Feldman Books Reviews

The Ninth Day retains several of the elements that made Blue Thread so original and successful—Jewish protagonists, themes, and history that are deftly incorporated into the plot, an entirely new way to time travel, and well-written and researched historical settings - while still managing to be an entirely different beast of a story. The book jumps forward in time approximately 40 years and takes place in Berkeley right in the middle of the free speech protests that occurred on the University of Berkeley’s campus in the mid-sixties.

The protagonist, Hope Miriam Friis is the granddaughter of Blue Thread's Miriam Josefson. Hope is shy and reserved due to her pronounced stutter. The book opens several weeks after an unplanned LSD experience resulting in a bad trip that led to her face getting cut open. When Serakh shows up, requesting that Hope use her grandmother’s prayer shawl to travel back to 11th century France to save a newborn child from being killed by his father due to what he believes is a prophetic vision. Along with all this, Hope has to take care of her ailing grandfather and navigate the political tensions arising from the free speech riots happening practically next door. In working her way through her insecurities, Hope is able to find strength she didn’t think she had and is able to raise and use her voice like she never has before.

I loved Hope’s story even more than I loved Miriam’s, and I really appreciated that, given all the recurring elements in The Ninth Day, Ruth Tenzer Feldmen did not make Hope a carbon copy of Miriam. I loved that Hope was so quiet, meek, and afraid to speak and put herself out there due to her stutter (which, btw for anyone who’s wondering, is a plot point in that Hope has to struggle in spite of her stutter, but she is not magically cured of it in the end, and is something she instead starts the process of accepting as a part of her.) Her struggle to speak up (or sing, as the case may be) and the resolution of the book in which she begins the process of seeing herself as someone who can accomplish anything she wants to, even with a stutter, are all the more meaningful because we, the reader, can visually see her struggle on every page as she fights to say the things she wants to say and be heard by those who won’t listen to her, such as her older sister Dagmar and the French father Avram.

Also, once again, I fell in love with Ruth Tenzer Feldman’s ability to write vividly realized historical settings that directly tie into the protagonists’ own obstacles she’s striving to overcome and are connected to each other in seemingly unexpected ways. Let’s just say that LSD is not limited to the ‘60s storyline in this book, and Hope’s gleaned knowledge about the drug is integral to her coming up with a plan to save Avram and Dolcette’s newborn baby all the way back in Dark Ages France. Additionally, Ruth Tenzer Feldman places the reader right in the middle of the free speech protests, surrounding Hope with passionate students who are fighting for the right to be heard from an administration that thinks they don’t deserve the right to engage in political activism.

I heartily recommend both The Ninth Day and its predecessor Blue Thread to anyone who wants well-written historical fiction using new and unconventional time periods connected in unexpected yet entirely relevant ways.
The Ninth Day is the second novel in Feldman’s Blue Thread saga, which chronicles the continuing adventures of a Jewish bloodline whose women can travel through time with the use of a magic shawl and a time traveling ancestor named Serakh. Much like in Blue Thread, Miriam Hope, a teenage girl in 1960s Berkeley, gets caught up in the social cause of the time period — free speech on college campuses. Her life is complicated by typical teenager problems such as school, drugs, a stutter, and figuring out how to save a baby whose father wants to kill it because a vision told him to do it.

Unfortunately, The Ninth Day suffers from the same issues as its predecessor. It attempts to include too many different components — coming-of-age, history, religion, drug use, freedom of speech, and time travel — and fails to sufficiently explore any of them. While the Miriam in Blue Thread saw her suffrage battle paralleled in the fight for property rights in biblical times, the connection here is even more tenuous. Miriam Hope travels through time because of her experience with LSD, which is a weak impetus for the character’s actions.

The author’s, and Miriam’s, opinion of LSD is confusing. It feels primarily demonized, but then Miriam also uses it to solve the narrative’s central conflict. Her reaction to the realization of the events that surround the cause of her stutter are also nonsensical and unsatisfying. The act of drugging another person isn’t given the emotional weight it deserves. LSD is billed as an important part of Miriam’s backstory and the central conflict, but she doesn’t act like a normal person in regards to it.

It seems unwise to have built the conflict’s solution around a hallucinogenic drug. It works out mostly because it just so happens to work out. The same can be said of the time traveling aspects. There are few answers to how and why it works, and the fact that even Serakh doesn’t get it is frustrating. Things happen because “The One” wills them to happen, and that’s that.

The child that Miriam is forced to save also lacks significance in terms of the narrative. The events that give rise to the conflict surrounding the child likely happened to many families, but “The One” specifically dictates that this child is the one she should save. Miriam is only allowed to save this one child, which made me think the child had a special role to play, but nothing about the child is ever revealed. It makes me wonder why “The One” chose to save this child instead of the thousands of believers who died in a genocide prior to these events.

The Ninth Day’s setting doesn’t especially work either. The backdrop to the story is the freedom of speech protests in Berkeley, but that doesn’t have much to do with LSD, Miriam, or her journey. Miriam gets roped into these protests, but their importance feels like a footnote in the overall narrative, which is frustrating because of how much of the novel is devoted to them.

While Miriam is written as a strong and empowered woman, her hypocritical actions belie her role as a social justice warrior. She fails to correct the injustices within her own life, which could be chocked up to forgiveness, but forgiveness isn’t justice. She can travel through time to right the wrongs of the past, but inexplicably can’t do the same in her own time. It’s an unsatisfying conclusion to a inconsistent story.

Feldman has chosen an interesting time period for her coming-of-age tale, but again fails to capitalize upon it. Her decision to focus on time traveling and LSD instead of her characters and their setting once again results in an inconsistent narrative full of questions and inexplicable events. If Feldman chooses to keep the time traveling component in a future novel in this saga, she might need another hundred pages or so to fully explore each component and what each means to her protagonist.