"It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon. . . . " This is how Abby Whitshank always describes the day she fell in love with Red in July 1959.

The Whitshanks are one of those families that radiate an indefinable kind of specialness, but like all families, their stories reveal only part of the picture: Abby and Red and their four grown children have accumulated not only tender moments, laughter, and celebrations, but also jealousies, disappointments, and carefully guarded secrets.

From Red's parents, newly arrived in Baltimore in the 1920s, to the grandchildren carrying the Whitshank legacy boisterously into the twenty-first century, here are four generations of lives unfolding in and around the sprawling, lovingly worn house that has always been their anchor.

I enjoyed this book well enough. As ever Tyler manages to cover the gamut of emotions, events & traumas that occur in a family of three generations. While nothing particularly out of the ordinary happens, Tyler as ever manages to make day-to-day family problems entertaining by virtue of her believable - & often quirky - characters.

That said, I don't find anything in it that particularly distinguishes it from other of Tyler's novels as the characters are those that I've met before in her other books. Her stories jump straight in with the action (for want of a better phrase, action isn't a word that lends itself to these books!) which I like but more often than not at the end I'm left feeling that I've missed the point somewhere along the line - like there's a moral tucked in there but it's just gone straight over my head!

Overall a pleasant read, nothing to dislike about it but nothing that I can get excited about either.

Released as part of the SEPTEMBER SAPPHIRE CHALLENGE (#26)




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