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  • A Spool of Blue Thread

  • By: Anne Tyler
  • Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
  • Length: 13 hrs and 18 mins
  • 4.0 out of 5 stars (531 ratings)
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A Spool of Blue Thread cover art

A Spool of Blue Thread

By: Anne Tyler
Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
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Summary

The Sunday Times best seller

Shortlisted for the Man Booker prize

Shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Fiction prize

A Richard and Judy Book Club pick

"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 summer’s day in 1959. The whole family on the porch, half-listening as their mother tells the same tale they have heard so many times before.

From that porch we spool back through the generations, witnessing the events, secrets and unguarded moments that have come to define the family. 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 - four generations of Whitshanks, their lives unfolding in and around the sprawling, lovingly worn Baltimore house that has always been their home....

©2015 Anne Tyler (P)2015 Random House Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"She’s changed my perception on life." (Anna Chancellor)

"One of my favourite authors." (Liane Moriarty)

"She spins gold." (Elizabeth Buchan)

What listeners say about A Spool of Blue Thread

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  • 4 out of 5 stars
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  • Overall
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    3 out of 5 stars

Okay

I read this because it was on everyone's must read list. I never felt as though it really got going. I have read several books which focus on the minutiae of life and thoroughly enjoyed them. This was kind of meh.

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17 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

eventually you did. Happy endings all around.


“The trouble with dying,” she’d told Jeannie once, “is that you don’t get to see how everything turns out. You won’t know the ending.”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

Beautifully written and full of interesting characters, a study of love in families, with all the misunderstandings, bindings and secrets that individuals carry to build a unit that shifts through time and our very existence.

“Abby had a little trick that she used any time Red acted like a cranky old codger. She reminded herself of the day she had fallen in love with him.”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

I did not think I was going to like this book, but in the end it seduced me into its rhythm and language and the people that it so gently loves and describes, sometimes with humor, sometimes with sadness that made the pages difficult to see.

“But it has occurred to me, on occasion, that our memories of our loved ones might not be the point. Maybe the point is their memories—all that they take away with them. What if heaven is just a vast consciousness that the dead return to? And their assignment is to report on the experiences they collected during their time on earth. The hardware store their father owned with the cat asleep on the grass seed, and the friend they used to laugh with till the tears streamed down their cheeks, and the Saturdays when their grandchildren sat next to them gluing Popsicle sticks. The spring mornings they woke up to a million birds singing their hearts out, and the summer afternoons with the swim towels hung over the porch rail, and the October air that smelled like wood smoke and apple cider, and the warm yellow windows of home when they came in on a snowy night. ‘That’s what my experience has been,’ they say, and it gets folded in with the others—one more report on what living felt like. What it was like to be alive.”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

A celebration of what families are and the love we sometimes find so hard to express, made all too evident in the lives of this family Anne Tyler created with so much skill and care for all the delicate memories, that remind us that our memories and of their importance; of how we never want to misplace them because they are the essence of our lives.

Love the reader Kimberly Farr, she presented the story even more vividly than a group of actors could.

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15 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

What a surprise!

This is the first of Anne Tyler's books I have read and for the first couple of chapters I didn't like it, it seemed to be dull and not going anywhere.
I am a Psychotherapist and we don't make judgements - wrong, I made judgements about the beautifully drawn characters at first negatively, but each time I heard their stories I found myself empathising with them. They made me laugh and cry, feel angry and happy by turns. This a great book for anyone who is interested in people and what makes them tick.
Now I can't wait to read another of her books.

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14 people found this helpful

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    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Lively and Quirky Characters

I read this as on the Man Booker Longlist. It is said that this will be the last novel the author Anne Tyler writes.
This book is initially about Red and Abby Whitshank who are an older couple with health and memory issues and needing the support of their family to stay in the home they have been in for years. They are surrounded by a large family.
Much of the story is around the transition Red and Abby face. The writing is full of descriptive phrases and although it is about mundane daily life Tyler captures the stresses and strains and draws the reader into it. The characters are lively and quirky.
The story drifts back in time to how Red and Abby met and then how Red’s parents met.
The development of some characters are adequate whereas others are not for example the character of ‘black sheep’ son Denny is left unresolved which was frustrating.
The narration by KimberleyFarr was so annoying and gave me such a headache. I would recommend reading this as a physical book or on #Kindle.
I think this is a middle of the road book and Im glad I read it but it was not a major read for me.

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13 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Wonderful, engrossing

My first Anne Tyler. The story of an ordinary family. And of all us. And of all our lives. So perceptive. Beautifully read.

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13 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Wonderful characters and absorbing story

Beautiful attention to detail in dialogue, characterisation and description. Relates the everyday drama and highs and lows of family life.

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12 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

When is something going to happen?!

Would you try another book written by Anne Tyler or narrated by Kimberly Farr?

No to Anne Tyler, yes to Kimberly Farr.

Has A Spool of Blue Thread put you off other books in this genre?

It has put me off other books by Anne Tyler.

Which character – as performed by Kimberly Farr – was your favourite?

Enjoyed Linny May and Junior's story more than the rest.

What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?

Boredom.

Any additional comments?

I found most of the book very tedious, and I kept waiting in vain for something interesting to happen.

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11 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

Not Tyler's best.

I had to read this book as it was a book club suggestion. I usually love Tyler's work and have read most of her books, so I was pleased with this selection. I found it boring in places and some of the characters to be highly clichéd. This is a nice book about a family without much of a storyline.

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9 people found this helpful

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    2 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

Not For Me

I love many of Anne Tyler's books and have read almost of them I think. But this is the second audio book of hers I have bought and I didn't enjoy either of them. Maybe I chose the wrong books, or maybe they work better for me 'in my head' rather than being read to.

I see from the reviews of this recording that views are polarized - but several reviewers said they found it boring and so did I.

The gentleness of her writing and skillful character drawing are both present in this book - the problem really began with me realizing about 25% of the way in, that I didn't like any of the characters she had drawn, except maybe one of Abby's daughters. The elder son just annoyed me, as did the family's rather pathetic 'fear' of him and his casually nasty behaviour. Then we veered off into a distant back-story...I was bored by this point and I considered abandoning it, but I kept going.

The story goes back and forth and though there are some plot twists, nothing much really happens. I don't usually mind that, as long as the journey is rewarding but for me, it was not.

The narration was OK; it did seem to match the dull, rather whiny tone of the book. No-one was ever really happy it seemed; but no-one was unhappy enough to tackle it. So the family, much like the book, just drift.

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7 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Man-Booker shortlisted - Why?

I found the first half of this book rather boring - Denny to me was an insipid, irritating piece in this saga. I was much more interested in the Red & Abbey, Junior & linney-may storylines. I enjoyed the familiar, conversational writing style though.

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7 people found this helpful