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

From her nursing home, a grandmother teaches her two granddaughters how to quilt under the compassionate and watchful eye of their narrating mother.
Jennifer has just graduated from college with a business degree and intends to be a millionaire by the age of thirty. Her younger, shyer sister, Susan, is studying to be a teacher. When Susan asks, "Grama, could you teach me to make a quilt?" she starts these four women on a journey - a passing of values and wisdom from one generation to the next.
For Jennifer and Susan, Grama's simple lessons in the art of quilting becomes a profound metaphor for stitching together the fabric of their lives. As these young women learn twelve crucial lessons in quilt making, they discover how to create their own destiny by combining quality work, perseverance, and the right amount of vibrant color.
As in life, in the ninth month comes fruition: Jennifer's and Susan's quilts are completed, but so is Grama's journey. One thing remains to be finished: the unique quilt Grama has been making as a surprise present for their mother. When they discover all the gifts - both material and spiritual - that Grama left behind, they find her ultimate legacy, the Golden Needle: Do everything with love.

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.

A lecturer on women and creativity, Webb self-published her very genuine, warmly written novel a few years ago. According to the press release, the self-published book sold 25,000 copies and also became a best-seller in Japan. A paradigm for living, Webb's narrative takes the form of quilting instructions passed down from grandmother to granddaughters over the course of a year. Each of the title's 12 golden threads embodies a "metaphor for what we need to do in life," with the mother of the young women providing narration and an ongoing dialogue that enhances Grama's lessons. As the granddaughters progress with work on their quilts, Webb portrays the close and gratifying relationship existing between three generations of women. In what is essentially a series of homilies, the positive effects of valuing such things as commitment, goals, responsibility, and cooperation are proclaimed throughout. Alice Joyce