A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler

A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler

Have you ever read a book that has put you through the emotional ringer…quite literally.  It starts off and you think:  Meh? but then it picks up, lets you down, gets a little bit exciting again but then ultimately just lets you down?  That would be this book and I have mixed feelings about its worthiness.  There were no highs or lows, no climaxes, no resolution…just a story that gets longer and longer and longer…?

“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. The Whitshanks are one of those families that radiate togetherness: an indefinable, enviable kind of specialness. But they are also like all families, in that the stories they tell themselves reveal only part of the picture. Abby and Red and their four grown children have accumulated not only tender moments, laughter, and celebrations, but also jealousies, disappointments, and carefully guarded secrets. from Red’s father and mother, newly-arrived in Baltimore in the 1920s, to Abby and Red’s grandchildren carrying the family legacy boisterously into the twenty-first century, here are four generations of Whitshanks, their lives unfolding in and around the sprawling, lovingly worn Baltimore house that has always been their anchor.” (Goodreads)

It’s a story with a lot of potential but, sadly, the book didn’t deliver and for that reason I’m going to give it a generous 3 COFFEE CUPS ☕☕☕.