Book Review: A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler unspools a story smoothly. No tangled confusion. She has such a great sense of place, time, and people. In A Spool of Blue Thread, you feel as if you are sitting on the Whitshank's fabulous porch and enjoying their lives.

cover blurb:  It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon....This is how Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959.  Anne Tyler spins a family tale of laughter, celebrations, jealousy, disappointments, secrets, and death. We meet the grown kids who move back to the homestead, worried about Abby's "spells". The aging issue is handled well, along with the black sheep son Denny who returns (and was always secretly Abby's favorite).

Here are some samples of Anne Tyler's writing
p. 56  And in looks, they were no more than average. Their leanness was the rawboned kind not the lithe, elastic slenderness of people in magazine ads, and something a little too sharp in their faces suggested that while they themselves were eating just fine, perhaps their forefathers had not.

p.168  She might suddenly smell again the bitter, harsh, soul-dampening fumes of the chopped onions and green peppers her mother fried up most evenings as the base for her skillet dinners

A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler is a calming, tender read about a family. So many little moments in lives sewn together with love and language precision.