** spoiler alert ** I really enjoyed The Island, despite its flaws and I was hoping for a similarly good plot with The Thread, but I was pretty disappointed.

The history of the novel was interesting, but it really dragged on and on in the last quarter of the book as there was no climactic scene like in The Island. On the face of it, the novel was fine but there were just too many problems with it for me to give it more than two stars. For a start all the characters were either good or bad, selfish or selfless. The poor were wonderful people with tonnes of friends and the rich only cared about money and were ultimately miserable and alone. I realise the Moreno family was an exception to this, but they still chose to live in the poorest part of the city and were therefore wonderful.

I also had issues with inconsistencies in characters, like the fact that Hislop makes a point of saying the twins have "little in common" besides their looks, before going on to say they both want to be tobacco graders, they both dislike school and have no interest in their mother's weaving, and later on they are practically finishing each other's sentences.

It bugged me that there was very little reason given for why Eugenia takes in the five-year-old Katerina and raises her, and no real gratitude or reflection on this from Katerina's point of view. Later on Katerina says the fact that a soldier picked her up and threw her on a boat out of dangerous Smyrna as "the greatest kindness that's ever been shown to me". Err, what about a woman taking you in, feeding you, clothing you, and making you part of her family without anyone even asking her to?! There were moments and inconsistencies like that throughout the novel which just wound me up.

There was simply too much stuff happening and too many characters to make anything in particularly meaningful in my view. I wanted Hislop to stop, take a breath and really explore what was going on in a scene or era - it seemed rushed and not nearly enough attention was given to the narrative, which seemed confused in places.

I enjoyed learning about the history of the city, which I wouldn't have discovered otherwise, but the actual story and how it was told left a lot to be desired.