Twelve Golden Threads: Lessons for Successful Living from Grandma's Quilt

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060174633 ISBN 13: 9780060174637

Publisher: Harpercollins, 1996

From her nursing home, a grandmother teaches her granddaughters how to quilt, but the lessons become profound as the women stitch together the fabric of their lives

From the Publisher:

Twelve Golden Threads is the story of an aged grandmother who, when her two granddaughters ask her to teach them quilting, sagely seizes the opportunity to instill in them the timeworn values she has spent a lifetime acquiring. Her elder granddaughter, Jennifer, who has just graduated from college with an unquenchable ambition to be a millionaire by the time she is thirty, is impulsive and impatient. The younger, Susan, is more circumspect, but lacking in confidence.

Both young women are eager to learn the master craft from Grama, though she warns them that it will take hard work and dedication. Grama knows that at times their interest will flag, at others they will grow frustrated by this difficult traditional art form. But after years perfecting the craft, she also knows that every step in making a quilt is a metaphor for creating a successful life -- and that teaching them the art of quilting is a golden opportunity to pass on vital lessons on what is truly important.

A work of fiction imbued with a keen understanding of the nurturing values essential to a well-lived life, Twelve Golden Threads entertains, instructs and inspires. By drawing on the traditional art of quilting, Aliske Webb, herself an avid quilter, has found an apt metaphor for the wisdom of traditional truths that many yearn to reintroduce into their often hectic modern lives. A story of strong women and a loving family, its timely values cross generations and speak to our longing for meaning in our lives.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A How To Make an American Quilt wannabe that has already sold 25,000 copies in a self-published (1992) edition. Unlike bestselling Whitney Otto, however, motivational speaker and first- novelist Webb abandons any pretense of a story and allows her ``lessons'' to overtake--utterly--the barely breathing narrative. Bank employee Jennifer, a recent college graduate, and serious-minded high-school student Susan are sisters, but that's all we learn about them, since they're used only as vehicles to promote their mother's and their paternal grandmother's purported words of wisdom. On one of their monthly visits to Grama, the sisters decide to undertake a project: They will each, with Grama's expert guidance, design and make a quilt of their own in a year's time. Each month, the girls and their advice-spouting (``Cooperation is always a better way''), monologue-spewing psychologist mother drive to the seniors' complex in Clareville, where Grama has lived and quilted for 20 years. Over the 12 months before the old woman, predictably, passes on--leaving her two granddaughters with finished quilts and a lifetime of jargony catch phrases for success (``Persevere Through the Tough Times,'' etc.)- -Jennifer and Susan trace, cut, and sew with all the spark and personality of two automatons with failing batteries. As if to hammer home the point that women pass on women's wisdom to women, the men in these women's lives are kept conveniently out of the picture; brother Robbie's at college out west, and father Jack (along with his father) died years before. Most telling, perhaps, when Grama worries that she may sound like a ``Grand Old Guru,'' you find yourself nodding in consent. The literary equivalent of a dose of castor oil, this plodding self-helper reads more like a bad sermon than real fiction. (Literary Guild alternate selection; $200,000 ad/promo; author tour; TV satellite tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.