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Changing Patterns Judith Barrow Books

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Changing Patterns Judith Barrow Books

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Changing Patterns Judith Barrow Books Reviews

I read the first part of this trilogy so long ago I wondered if I’d pick up the threads but Barrow does a masterful job of trickling in just enough information to enable you to feel as though you have picked up the characters right where you left them.

This book starts with a tragedy which brings the remaining family and friends back together with Mary and Peter. I loved Mary, right from the start, she is drawn reluctantly into having to deal with everyone else’s problems while actually wanting and needing time to deal with her own.

Mary and Peter were my favourite couple. Peter, a German ex POW, steady and quiet and I so much wanted things to turn out well for them. It is difficult to imagine, when reading this from the luxury of distance of time, how difficult it must have been for their relationship to succeed straight after the war. The hostility they must have faced.

What Barrow does so well is write characters and settings, I mustn’t forget those as they are wonderful! The storylines keep you turning the pages as well as shadows from the past come back to haunt the present and I fear will continue to cause problems in the future. In fact, reading her work is endlessly pleasurable and you are whisked back to this period with every lovingly written syllable.

I highly recommend this series for all who love to bury themselves in an authentically told and expertly crafted tale. I immediately downloaded the next one, which tells you all you need to know.
Changing Patterns by Judith Barrow is a nostalgic novel set in 1950 which succeeded in evoking lots of different emotional responses as I was reading it. It’s in turn, funny, sad and heart warming but also has a serious dose of tension thrown into the mix.

Barrow has created this novel as the second in her Shadows’ trilogy. As with all series, you can’t beat reading them in the order that they were intended; however, this is a story that works perfectly well as a standalone. Five years have passed since Pattern of Shadows and Barrow does a great job of providing her readers with just enough back story.

Mary and Peter, the seemingly star-crossed lovers, have been reunited and are living in idyllic surroundings in a coastal village in Wales. Sadly though, tragedy never seems to be far away from this couple and, just as it feels like they may get their happy ever after, Mary is pulled into a family drama that threatens to rip her relationship with Peter apart.

One of Barrow’s many strengths is the amount of historic research she has done and the attention to detail which brings her story alive. As someone who was brought up in a Northern industrial city as part of a working class community, lots of Barrow’s descriptions brought a smile to my face as memories of my grandparents’ back to back houses, complete with outside toilets and front rooms that were rarely used, came flooding back. It is a credit to Barrow’s writing that her settings are not only realistic but become a central part of the story. At times, it reminded me of the setting for a drama and I could well envisage the whole thing being played out on our TV screens.

I like so many things about this novel but not least the dynamics of the Howarth family. As the oldest girl, Mary has been conditioned to put other people’s needs before her own and she does this time and time again at the expense of her own happiness. Her younger sister Ellen is almost childlike due to her reliance on Mary to take control every time life becomes difficult. No matter that everyone around them can see that their relationship isn’t healthy, they seem destined to carry on playing their predetermined roles.

Barrow gives us a warts and all glimpse of life in a close knit community. The back to back housing means that there is no space for privacy or individuality and that can be oppressive and limiting. However, it also has its positives, for example when a child goes missing everyone in the community immediately pulls together as part of the search. Likewise, it’s easy to idealise the idea of strong women and a matriarchal society but Barrow reminds us that women can be just as bullying and aggressive as men. Ellen’s mother in law is the epitome of a spiteful, angry woman dominating her family’s life in such a way that she is making everyone unhappy.

Strangely my favourite character is Mary’s brother, Patrick, who on the surface is an unpleasant bully. He has been brought up in a home where domestic abuse is the norm. His only male role model was a man who expressed his anger and frustrations by lashing out. Patrick has seen his mother’s suffering as a victim of domestic abuse and has vowed to himself he will never be like his father. However, he struggles with his own anger and does in fact strike his wife. He’s also a womaniser who measures his self-worth by his attractiveness to women. There is no doubt though that at heart he is a good man and Barrow allows us to see his journey to become a better husband, father and human being. By the end of the novel, I was really rooting for him to rise above his upbringing.

Barrow also explores racial prejudice in the novel through the difficulties that Peter endures. It’s hardly surprising that, during the years following the war, communities who had suffered devastating losses refused to welcome a German into their midst. However, the story expresses hope for humanity as gradually tensions ease and it becomes clear that Peter is no different to anyone else. Parts of the story felt very relevant to modern day Britain where we are becoming increasingly wary of outsiders. There is poignancy in the way Peter insists that his children have English names because he doesn’t want them to be singled out. This sadly reminded me of my own new Hungarian neighbours who have anglicised their names to try and fit in.

From beginning to end the novel is threaded with tension. The Howarth family are burdened with secrets that they are each trying to keep in order to protect the ones they love. It’s clear though that the secrets are destined to come out as the longer they are kept the more potentially toxic they become. In George Shuttleworth, Barrow has created a villain who is always lurking in the shadows threatening to cause heartache for the Howarth family, which ultimately he does. Cleverly though, Barrow doesn’t make George a one dimensional baddie. He is odious and repulsive but he is also a victim of violence and anger and is deeply unhappy.

I can’t recommend Changing Patterns enough; it is a top notch read that kept me glued to my kindle well into the wee hours. If you love a series then I suggest you opt for Pattern of Shadows first. If not then dive straight into this one – you won’t regret it.
We’ve all read epic family sagas—sweeping multi-generational tales like The Thorn Birds, The Godfather, Roots, the Star Wars franchise, and anything remotely connected to the British Monarchy. So as I read Judith Barrow’s Howarth Family trilogy, I kept trying to slot them into those multigenerational tropes

*First generation, we were supposed to see the young protagonist starting a new life with a clean slate, perhaps in a new country.
*The next generation(s) are all about owning their position, fully assimilated and at home in their world.
*And the last generation is both rebel and synthesis, with more similarities to the first generation made possible by the confidence of belonging from the second one.

But the complex, three-dimensional miniatures I met in the first three books of the trilogy stubbornly refused to align with those tropes. First of all, there’s Mary Howarth—the child of parents born while Queen Victoria was still on the throne—who is poised between her parents’ Victorian constraints, adjustment to a world fighting a war, and their own human failures including abuse, alcoholism, and ignorance.When Pattern of Shadows begins in 1944, war-fueled anti-German sentiment is so strong, even the King has changed the British monarchy’s last name from Germanic Saxe-Coburg to Windsor. Mary’s beloved brother Tom is imprisoned because of his conscientious objector status, leaving their father to express his humiliation in physical and emotional abuse of his wife and daughters. Her brother Patrick rages at being forced to work in the mines instead of joining the army, while Mary herself works as a nurse treating German prisoners of war in an old mill now converted to a military prison hospital.

Mary’s family and friends are all struggling to survive the bombs, the deaths, the earthshaking changes to virtually every aspect of their world. We’ve all seen the stories about the war—plucky British going about their lives in cheerful defiance of the bombs, going to theaters, sipping tea perched on the wreckage, chins up and upper lips stiff in what Churchill called “their finest hour”. That wasn’t Mary’s war.

Her war is not a crucible but a magnifying glass, both enlarging and even inflaming each character’s flaws. Before the war, the Shuttleworth brothers might have smirked and swaggered, but they probably wouldn’t have considered assaulting, shooting, raping, or murdering their neighbors. Mary and her sister Ellen would have married local men and never had American or German lovers. Tom would have stayed in the closet, Mary’s father and his generation would have continued abusing their women behind their closed doors. And Mary wouldn’t have risked everything for the doomed love of Peter Schormann, an enemy doctor.

I was stunned by the level of historical research that went into every detail of these books. Windows aren’t just blacked out during the Blitz, for example. Instead, they are “criss crossed with sticky tape, giving the terraced houses a wounded appearance.” We’re given a detailed picture of a vanished world, where toilets are outside, houses are tiny, and privacy is a luxury.

The Granville Mill becomes a symbol of these dark changes. Once a cotton mill providing jobs and products, it’s now a prison camp that takes on a menacing identity of its own. Over the next two volumes of Howarth family’s story, it’s the mill that continues to represent the threats, hatred, and violence the war left behind.

Unlike the joyful scenes we’re used to, marking the end of the war and everyone’s return to prosperity and happiness, the war described in these books has a devastatingly long tail. When Changing Patterns takes up the story in 1950, Mary and Peter have been reunited and are living in Wales, along with her brother Tom.

But real life doesn’t include very many happy-ever-afters, and the Howarths have to live with the aftermath of the secrets each of them has kept. The weight of those secrets is revealed in their effect on the next generation, the children of the Howarth siblings. The battle between those secrets and their family bonds is a desperate one, because the life of a child hangs in the balance.

Finally, the saga seems to slide into those generational tropes in Living in the Shadows, the final book of the Howarth trilogy. Interestingly enough, this new generation does represent a blend of their preceding generations’ faults and strengths, but with the conviction of their modern identities. Where their parents’ generation had to hide their secrets, this new generation confidently faces their world as gay, as handicapped, as unwed parents, and—ultimately shrugging off their parents’ sins—as family.

But I didn’t really understand all of that until I considered the title of the prequel (released after the trilogy). 100 Tiny Threads tells the story of that first generation, their demons, their loves, their hopes, and their failures, and most importantly, their strength to forge a life despite those failures. That book, along with the novella-sized group of short stories in Secrets, gives the final clues to understanding the trilogy. As Simone Signoret said, “Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads, which sew people together through the years.” And it’s both those secrets and those threads not only unite them into a family, but ultimately provide their strength.

This is the part where I’m supposed to tell you that each of these wonderful books can be read alone. But no, don’t do that. In fact, if you haven’t read any of them, you’re luckier than I am, because you can start with the prequel and read in chronological order. I chose to review these books as a set, and I believe that’s how they should be read.

Every now and then, I come across books so beautifully written that their characters follow me around, demanding I understand their lives, their mistakes, their loves, and in this case, their families. Taken together, the Howarth Family stories are an achievement worth every one of the five stars I’d give them.
Enjoyed reading this book.