I started reading this book and then decided to download the audio so I had could listen to the book while I did some work. I enjoyed the audio book and following along in the physical book.

This is the story of Willa Drake. She is a woman who has lived a life lead by others. The decisions that others make have affected her starting at the age of 11. Her mother disappears at various times growing up.

She gets married and becomes a young widow. Her kids grow up and move out and she meets another man. She starts to feel her life is mundane and then she makes a split decision to help her son's ex girlfriend who is injured and take care of her daughter. The people she meets while helping this woman shape her life to the possibility of making a change in her life. ( )

Anne Tyler has been doing the same kind of thing for decades now, but she is supremely good at it, able to conjure up complex sets of family relationships with a few telling lines of dialogue or a minor bit of background detail. This time she tries to fool us into thinking she’s doing something different from usual, by spending the first hundred pages with people who live in weird foreign places like Pennnsylvania and California. But don’t worry, we get back to familiar ground soon enough, and all the rest of the book plays in a pleasantly quaint neighbourhood of Baltimore, just as we’ve been expecting! The central character, Willa, is summoned there (from her retirement in Arizona) as a result of a minor misunderstanding, but of course it soon becomes clear that this is where her true elective family is waiting for her. Nothing very radical or challenging, just beautiful writing and a lot of diverse and unexpected people being very nice to each other. ( )

Like many women who were coming of age when the women’s rights movement began seeing results in higher education and employment opportunities, the protagonist Willa did go to college and have ambitious career aspirations, but more to please the people around her, puts everything aside for her family. Willa decided when she was eleven that she would always be the steady, reliable, competent one in a relationship. Like her father, and in contrast to her volatile, dramatic, and sometimes AWOL mother. We meet Willa at eleven, twenty-one, and forty-one in vignettes of significant events in her life, and then the second half of the book is the main narrative, when she is sixty-one. I did not have a good sense of Willa’s character until the end of the book, but then it seemed possibly deliberate. I won’t give away any spoilers, but I could firmly relate to this character’s haphazard journey of self-discovery after a lifetime of working on being the rock for everyone else. ( )

I forgot how well the author develops her characters and this book continued that. I had not read one of her books in a long time...maybe ACCIDENTAL TOURIST was the last. A very warm and comfortable read with very imaginable characters. I wanted to be in the book! The reason I didn't give it 5 stars was only because of the ending. Predictable but inconclusive. ( )

Anne Tyler has this matter-of-fact way of telling stories, especially of women. Clock Dance is just such a tale: we follow Willa Drake through her life from her childhood in the 1960s through 2007 when a phone call from a stranger leads her to Baltimore. I adored the book from start to finish and Willa Drake is my new hero! ( )