A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler
Anne Tyler is a brilliant author, she's a Pulitzer Prize winner after all. Her stories revolve around families of all shapes and sizes, who live in and around Baltimore, Maryland. She paints vivid pictures of her characters with calming prose. A Spool of Blue Thread doesn't disappoint in any of those areas.
Abby and Red Whitshank have raised their children in a stately home built by Red's father, Junior. The house is a central character to the story, the glue, so to speak that keeps them together. When the children determine that Red and Abby are getting too old to live alone, the secrets the family harbors try to bubble up from their long buried hiding places.
For me however, I just plain didn't get it. The opening scene revolves around Denny, Abby and Red's son who has always been a little strange and aloof. Denny remains distant throughout the story and the reasons why the book opened with him, were never really resolved. At least in my mind. I found this book, though beautifully written, long and drawn out, without any resolution. None of the characters took the time to change or had any cathartic moments that forced them to. I know that some of you that have read this book might disagree with that statement because things did happen to this family. But they all seemed to brush off any events that had some depth and move along as if nothing had changed.
It's the struggle that makes a book worth reading. I was reading pages from anyone's ordinary life without a rip or a tear that need to be sewn back together. A Spool of Blue Thread never took the time to mend what truly needed mending.
Anne Tyler is a brilliant author, she's a Pulitzer Prize winner after all. Her stories revolve around families of all shapes and sizes, who live in and around Baltimore, Maryland. She paints vivid pictures of her characters with calming prose. A Spool of Blue Thread doesn't disappoint in any of those areas.
Abby and Red Whitshank have raised their children in a stately home built by Red's father, Junior. The house is a central character to the story, the glue, so to speak that keeps them together. When the children determine that Red and Abby are getting too old to live alone, the secrets the family harbors try to bubble up from their long buried hiding places.
For me however, I just plain didn't get it. The opening scene revolves around Denny, Abby and Red's son who has always been a little strange and aloof. Denny remains distant throughout the story and the reasons why the book opened with him, were never really resolved. At least in my mind. I found this book, though beautifully written, long and drawn out, without any resolution. None of the characters took the time to change or had any cathartic moments that forced them to. I know that some of you that have read this book might disagree with that statement because things did happen to this family. But they all seemed to brush off any events that had some depth and move along as if nothing had changed.
It's the struggle that makes a book worth reading. I was reading pages from anyone's ordinary life without a rip or a tear that need to be sewn back together. A Spool of Blue Thread never took the time to mend what truly needed mending.
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