Clock Dance
By Anne Tyler
Published 2018
Read Oct 2020
This reader found this book in one of several Little Free Libraries this author frequents and to which this book will return for a new reader. You can find a Little Free Library near you here.
This reader has enjoyed each of the Anne Tyler novels that she has read. They deliver stories of believable and (not overly) flawed people doing regular life things in an imperfect world. Tyler welcomes the reader into the world of her characters and provides them a taste of the imperfect and real lives they lead. Problems usually remain unresolved although the characters are not untouched.
In Clock Dance, the reader spends some time with central character Willa in 1967, when she is in fifth grade and her mother has left the family again for some unknown period of time; in 1977 when she is a junior in college and her boyfriend Derek is about to graduate and wants her to quit school and marry him and move to California; in 1997 when her husband Derek makes an aggressive move in traffic to soothe his road rage and manages to die in the accident that results; and finally in 2017 when she gets a call from Baltimore asking her to come to take care of a girl the caller thinks is Willa’s granddaughter while the girl’s mother is in the hospital.
We spend most of our time with Willa in 2017 as she and current husband Peter answer the request to come to care for Cheryl, the daughter of Denise, Willa’s son’s ex-girlfriend. Cheryl isn’t her granddaughter but the caller didn’t know that and Willa responds anyway. The readers are treated to living with Willa and Peter and Cheryl and her dog, Airplane, during the summer that Denise is recovering from a broken leg due to a stray bullet from an unknown gun. We meet characters in Denise and Cheryl’s neighborhood and we learn about Cheryl’s approach to living with a single mother. We learn about Willa and Peter’s marriage in 2017 although we don’t know when they married or anything about their life together prior to the here and now of this story.
This reader appreciates Tyler’s choices regarding what to tell us, what to show us, and what to leave unrevealed. Her endings are never abrupt nor do they tie the ends together—what happens next for the charactersis appropriately unclear. This reader looks forward to finding more Anne Tyler books in Little Free Libraries and in public libraries and to savoring more of Tyler’s stories of people and the families and friends who share their lives.
MarshaReads.com 