©2015 Anne Tyler (P)2015 Random House Audio. Another chapter focuses on his childhood sweetheart and near child-bride, Linnie, who follows Junior from North Carolina to Maryland during the 1930s in search of better times. Brimming with all the insight, humor, and generosity of spirit that are the hallmarks of Anne Tylers work, A Spool of Blue Thread tells a poignant yet unsentimental story in praise of family in all its emotional complexity. Several episodes reveal the history behind the family’s stately house, which was built by the Whitshank patriarch, Junior. The novel’s structure is nonlinear, and chapters travel back and forth in time, following different characters in different generations. If Red’s particular understanding of modern reflects his obsessive focus on his contracting business, each of the Whitshanks turns out to have made assumptions about the others based on quirks of personality and perspective, all of which are exploded before the novel’s ending. Why, my folks lived long enough to see aluminum-frame window screens, and clip-on fake mullions and flush doors and fiberglass bathtubs.” Modern times! We’d sent men into space by then. And it all seems so long ago, although truth to tell it was only back in the sixties. As Red looks back on some of the losses he’s suffered, he notes ruefully, “I feel like it sort of slipped by me.
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