Spool of Blue Thread (Tyler)

Book Reviews
The seemingly effortless, leisurely pace at which Tyler introduces her complicated, multigenerational family and lets the plot unfold belie the skill with which she compresses information into a relatively short space.... Anne Tyler’s novels are invitations to spend time in the houses of the Baltimore neighborhood that she has built—house by house, block by block, word by word—over her long and bright career.
Francine Prose - New York Review of Books


Tyler slyly dismantles the myth-making behind all our family stories.... She does so with a compassion that recognizes that few of us will be immune to similar accommodations with the truth.... The novel [makes] piercing forays into the long-distant past.... We are not reading the fiction of estrangement, or of disorientation, but its power derives from the restless depths beneath its unfractured surface.
Alex Clark - Guardian (UK)


Tyler tenderly unwinds the tangled skeins of three generations, then knits them together . . . in precise often hilarious detail.... By the end of this deeply beguiling novel, we come to know a reality entirely different form the one at the start. Not that anyone’s lying, only that everything—the way we see the world and the way we understand it to work—is changed by the intimate, incremental shifts of daily life.
Roxana Robinson - O magazine


It is wonderful to pick up a novel from a bonafide literary superstar. A Spool of Blue Thread is Anne Tyler’s twentieth novel and it shows in every flawless sentence.... A stunning novel about family life which just rings so true—it depicts the bonds and the tensions, the love and the exasperation beautifully.... A terrific novel. (Book of the Month)
Bookseller (UK)


Thoroughly enjoyable but incohesive.... [An] interlude [about the parents] proves jarring for the reader, who at this point has invested plenty of interest in the siblings. Despite this, Tyler does tie these sections together, showing once again that she’s a gifted and engrossing storyteller.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) It's been half a century since Tyler debuted with If Morning Ever Comes, and her writing has lost none of the freshness and timelessness that has earned her countless awards and accolades. Now 73, she continues to dazzle with this multigenerational saga, which glides back and forth in time with humor and heart and a pragmatic wisdom that comforts and instructs.  —Beth Andersen, formerly with Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Tyler is as fleet and graceful as a skater, her prose as transparent as ice.... We get swept up in the spin of conversations, the slipstream of consciousness, and the glide and dip of domestic life, then feel the sting of Tyler’s quick and cutting insights into unjust assumptions about class, gender, age, and race.... Tyler’s long dedication to language and story [is] an artistic practice made perfect in this charming, funny, and shrewd novel of the paradoxes of self, family, and home. —Donna Seaman
Booklist


(Starred review.) Tyler gives us lovely insights into an ordinary family who, ‘like most families . . . imagined they were special.’ They will be special to readers thanks to the extraordinary richness and delicacy with which Tyler limns complex interactions and mixed feelings familiar to us all and yet marvelously particular to the empathetically rendered members of the Whitshank clan. The texture of everyday experience transmuted into art.... Family life in Baltimore [is] still a fresh and compelling subject in the hands of this gifted veteran.
Kirkus Reviews