You don’t want to protect the family from the bad stuff that you know is coming. You are not shocked when secrets are revealed. In this book, you don’t like or dislike anybody. Or maybe it was because I got used to her writing style by then. I didn’t like it as much as the first part because it was not about the family. I was hooked from the first page and the author had this nice breezy way of story-telling.īut the rest of the book focused on the previous generation. It was like a weird mix between A House for Mr.Biswas and Sense of an Ending. It focuses on the entire Whitshank family and their beloved house. Part one of the book was the best (and big). She is so good that I am surprised that I didn’t know about her until I picked up this book. She was able to put into words many emotions and tensions within a family that I will only be able to explain by pointing at it when it happens. But Anne Tyler was able to brilliantly capture the unreliable nature of family legends, the constant bitterness in long marriages and the hopeless pride families have in their ways. Not a lot of authors get family drama right. Reading A Spool of Blue Thread was like going down a tumultuous river on a raft knowing fully well that you’ll be safe. And while all families like to believe they are special, round that kitchen table over all those years we also see played out our own hopes and fears, rivalries and tensions – the essential nature of family life. From that porch we spool back through three generations of the Whitshanks, witnessing the events, secrets and unguarded moments that have come to define who and what they are. They’ve all come, even Denny, who can usually be relied on only to please himself.

Abby and Red are getting older, and decisions must be made about how best to look after them and their beloved family home. The whole family on the porch, relaxed, half-listening as their mother tells the same tale they have heard so many times before. ‘It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon…’ This is the way Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she and Red fell in love that day in July 1959.

A spool of blue thread ending