A Spool of Blue Thread - Book 21

Back from our beach vacation.  I admit, I was not ready to come home.  I could have stayed another week.  I felt like I was just starting to relax a bit.  It was fun though while it lasted.  We had 17 people altogether in a huge house right on the ocean.  The book that kept me company on the beach was A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler.

I have read many of Anne Tyler's books starting from way back in college.  I haven't read her though for a while because they started to all seem the same to me.  I think the last one I read was Saint Maybe which I quite liked.  But then I took a decade or so long break.

Anyway, this book was on sale so I picked it up at B&N.  This is her 20th novel and to me she has become a really masterful storyteller.  It was absorbing from the first page as it dealt with the lives of the Whitshank family of Baltimore.  Mostly it seemed to be told through the eyes of Abby the mother, but we also get to see things from Denny and Junior's perspective too.  It starts with Abby and Red dealing with the complexities of their four adult children, then it continues back to their childhood, then forward in time again and then back in time to when Linnie Mae and Junior (Red's parents) first met.  The unifying theme is really the house that Junior built in a Baltimore neighborhood.  The house he designed that he raised his two children in and then where his son Red raised his four kids.

It's a warm, gentle, insightful, clever, quirky story about the complexities of family.  Tyler writes with real affection for her characters.

Read this book!  It's good!

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