Anne Tyler may write about families better than any other author. Certainly in this novel she captures how a family can seem one way to outsiders but be completely different in reality, and how all of the members of the family can see shared experiences from completely different perspectives. And Tyler's characters are just so rich and well-written, they seem like actual people.
The Whitshanks are a regular middle class Baltimore family, who have two "family stories" that they all know: the story of how grandfather Junior built the family house and he and grandmother Linnie Mae came to live in it, and the story of how parents Abby and Red fell in love. In later sections of the book we learn that family legends are not always what they seem to be.
The Whitshank kids are all different - Stem, Denny, Jeannie, and Amanda. Denny is probably the most interesting of the kids but also the least well-developed in my opinion - I kept waiting to learn something else about him to explain why he was the way he was. But I loved how Tyler brought us the real stories of Junior and Linnie Mae and Red and Abby - those felt very real, and seemed like something that could have happened in anyone's family.
This was a really enjoyable book, and I highly recommend it.
A Spool of Blue Thread
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