After reading a Garrison Keillor humorous book, then a Jeff Shaara tome on the Civil War, I was ready for something a little more spiritual. I had seen books by Peterson advertised in "The Lutheran" magazine and had wanted to try one. I was really disappointed in this book. I thought it read like an assignment for an English class. Five sisters, raised by their grandmother, who were always bickering caused the grandmother to moan "Oh Lord, they're so lost." Come on! I have four daughters and the bickering is how they communicate -- it's not tragic, it's just the way life is, and they snap out of these moods about as quickly as they occur. I found myself objecting to Peterson's style of writing on almost every page: people don't talk like that! "Silently, she nodded her head." What? Can you be noisy while you're nodding your head? And the whole treatment of "the family's torn apart -- then they heal and get back together again" I found way too melodramatic. Other reviewers have suggested that Peterson does better with historical fiction than stories in contemporary settings. After reading "A Slender Thread" I'm not sure I want to give this author another shot.
This was a very dramatic book, maybe it was because I was hearing in with certain emphasis rather than reading my own thoughts into it, but this was a stressful book. There were several deaths throughout the book, and heart breaks, and lies, and betrayal. Almost everything that can go wrong did in one of the five sister's lives and then they had to struggle to go on. True it ends in a relative forgiveness, but rather abruptly when there were some 40-odd chapters of pure pain and torture. I love Tracie Peterson's work, but this is a book that I do not plan to ever read/listen to again. It is just too painful.
