A Spool of Blue Thread
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3.9 • 48 Ratings
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
From the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning author a brilliantly observed, joyful and wrenching, funny and true new novel that reveals, as only she can, the very nature of a family's life.
"It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon." This is the way Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959. The whole family--their two daughters and two sons, their grandchildren, even their faithful old dog--is on the porch, listening contentedly as Abby tells the tale they have heard so many times before. And yet this gathering is different too: Abby and Red are growing older, and decisions must be made about how best to look after them, and the fate of the house so lovingly built by Red's father. Brimming with the luminous insight, humor, and compassion that are Anne Tyler's hallmarks, this capacious novel takes us across three generations of the Whitshanks, their shared stories and long-held secrets, all the unguarded and richly lived moments that combine to define who and what they are as a family.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Veteran novelist Anne Tyler beautifully captures the small moments that make up the Whitshank family’s memory bank. Abby and Red raised their children—Denny, Stem, Jeannie, and Amanda—in the grand Baltimore home that Red’s father, Junior, meticulously built. Now in their sixties, the couple are starting to show the wear and tear of age, and their brood are both a great comfort and an endless source of bafflement and disappointment. Tyler captures conversations that are affecting in their realism and presents the Whitshanks' idiosyncrasies in vivid scenes. Reading A Spool of Blue Thread is a treat, like listening to a warm, lively, and affectionate expert narrate a fascinating home movie about a family that's at once ordinary and extraordinary.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thoroughly enjoyable but incohesive, Tyler's latest chronicles the Whitshank family through several generations in Baltimore, Md. The narrative initially tackles the mounting tensions among the grown Whitshank siblings as their aging parents, Red and Abby, need looking after. The youngest son, Stem, adopted as a toddler, moves back into the family house to help care for Abby, who has spells of forgetfulness. This causes resentment in Denny, the family's eldest biological son, who is capricious and has been known to drift in and out of their lives. As matters come to a head in Abby's life and the lives of her children, the story suddenly switches to an in-depth exploration of Red's parents and Red and Abby's courtship, delving into Whitshank family lore. The interlude proves jarring for the reader, who at this point has invested plenty of interest in the siblings. Despite this, Tyler does tie these sections together, showing once again that she's a gifted and engrossing storyteller. Announced first printing of 125,000 copies.
