I like to read the personal stories of history and Tyler does make this all appear easy. To go back in time, to delve into the past is what makes Tyler’s work always contextual and historically accurate. Likewise, the sudden death of Abby shocked me but didn’t feel unnecessary or unnatural. The revelation that Stem (Douglas) was adopted was unexpected yet satisfying, changing my interpretation of what I’d just read. All this aside, I thought Tyler did a fantastic job with the reveals in the main narrative section. As it was, they felt like interruptions to me as opposed to complementary parts. When I came across the first one I was jolted right out of a story that I’d been happily and deeply invested in and even though I think I understand what Tyler was intending by these flashbacks (to demonstrate how the stories we tell about our lives are just that, stories), I think she could’ve done this in a more sophisticated way. – Emily GaleĮven though I enjoyed reading them, the two flashbacks just didn’t work for me. So, although the structure unsettled me, I felt it was right. I thought the flashbacks (to the courtship of the two main older characters, and even further back to their parents) were essential to my overall picture of the family dynamics and I couldn’t think of an alternative way of telling the story that would have worked better. Death is just the end of your own life but it happens inconveniently in the middle of things for everyone else. By the end of the book I admired her decision. I didn’t understand why Tyler had taken my favourite character away and I was pretty annoyed about it. At that point I had to put the book down and take in the loss of that character. There’s a sudden death halfway through the story. That being said, I do think the book is better for having this section and if it hadn’t been there at all some of the poignancy in the portrayal of an aging Red and Abby as it relates to all of us throughout time would have been lost. I say more bearable because for me this was the least interesting section of the book, perhaps because these characters get less time than the others and are therefore more one dimensional. Because Junior and Linnie Mae were the forebears of characters I already knew so well, this section was much more bearable when it came towards the end of the book than I think it would have been were it at the beginning.

I think if this book had been traditionally structured in chronological order and begun with the relationship of Red’s parents in the 1920s I would have found these characters less interesting. To read a spoiler-free discussion of the book, please click here. WARNING: This blog post contains spoilers. Here are some notes from our own book club discussion of Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread. Each month we choose a newly released book that we feel is perfect for a book club.

A spool of blue thread characters