One Red Thread Hardcover – November 3, 2014

This gets 3.5 Stars from me. Ernie Wood is a talented writer and I think anything he writes is always going to land above average. He has a flair for elegant prose and his lush descriptions are truly evocative of specific times and settings. The details of a scene rush to the forefront of your experience and, in this book, those details help to immerse you in the history of these characters. There were more than a few times when I was taken with the precision of language he uses to capture the moment and noted specific lines of striking beauty. Seemingly benign motions by characters, like swinging a baby carrier, a subtle act that lesser writers would blaze past, come to life through Wood’s writing. It is almost as if you can feel the weight and texture of objects and the scents and emotions of scenes in tangible detail. That is a talent I very much admire. Lovers of detailed literature will enjoy this sensory journey. I found it akin to Jack Finney’s Time and Again in its attention to detail.My criticisms of this book come from areas where I struggled as a reader. I’m a lover of time travel adventure as a genre, but this book could be more accurately categorized with literary fiction. Time travel aficionados like myself may take similar issue with it. It does involve time travel but the method used was frustrating to understand. The story’s main protagonist, Eddy McBride, is capable of slipping into the past to observe and interact, but this ability is never adequately explained, or clearly defined. It also comes to light that nearly all the main characters in the story share this ability. That is an astounding detail of the world and one that begs questions as a reader, but those questions do not get answered. I struggled to get my mind around the limitations being set for this method of time travel but they seemed to vary constantly. Sometimes characters could only see the past but not interact. Sometimes they could stay in and even be injured in the past. What was supposedly an instantaneous journey and return in the present sometimes endangered the body left behind in the present. Every time I felt like I had discovered some hard and fast rule, it would be changed. The driving force of the mystery was a character who seemed very ineffective, and despite his warning that characters only had a few chances to get things right in the past, that rule was summarily dismissed by the protagonist, who goes on to keep time traveling anyway. The other characters’ motivations and limitations in regard to traveling were even more vague and I never did understand why all the burden of solving the issues at hand had to fall to the protagonist. I felt that if his efforts were so unsatisfactory that they darn well should have done something themselves. The character of Walter Lee was especially vexing in that category, his inability to swim notwithstanding.I really wanted to finish this book and see where it was going but found myself putting it down frequently due to frustration. One formatting issue with the story contributed to that, but may not be a deterrent to other readers. The book is written in first person perspective but is told from the point of view of multiple characters so you are obliged to hop into different characters heads every few pages. I have not seen that method employed often. I typically enjoy first person point of view so that would not have been a negative for me except for the fact that the main characters’ voices were not very distinct from one another. While the characters themselves had unique motivations and actions, their voices as narrators were nearly identical. Their vocabularies, sentence styles, and even the cadence and rhythm of their thoughts all read the same. If it were not for the character names attached to each section I would have had an impossible task of differentiating which character was speaking. I actually opened the book to random pages as an exercise and tried to determine which character was narrating. If not for their specific actions or references to other POV characters, I couldn’t tell the difference. The good news is that Ernie Wood writes really beautifully. If you are going to have a bunch of narrators who all sound the same, at least they all were erudite, eloquent speakers. It could be a lot worse.The title of this book, One Red Thread, ties to the plot of this tale, which is woven through the tapestry of the protagonist’s life and family history. The challenge for me was following the thread of plot through the fabric, which to me, all looked red as well. There were quite a few times where I wanted the story to just get on with it. I loved Wood’s descriptions of scenes and places but sometimes felt I was drowning in them and just needed something else to hold onto. The history of tragedy that the family endures is very interesting, but as it is surrounded with so much emotional “woolgathering” by the main characters, you don’t get much time to get oriented chronologically before being jerked into some other scene or worry of the characters. The present day dramas of the four main characters left me a bit callous, since the characters themselves were not especially likeable, other than that they all shared an affinity for the cat. I think the mysteries being addressed by the characters are solid and certainly would direct the fate of a family’s story, but I would have liked to see more actual resolution to the tale. It seemed at the end, a story doomed to repeat itself with the next generation of brooding, ineffectual time travelers.In conclusion, this is a book I was glad to experience for the sake of Ernie Wood’s beautiful writing. I learned from it and was certainly inspired by its beauty. The story itself is one I will remember by emotional feel more than structure or plot. It left me with the feeling that the past will always be the past, elusive and mesmerizing, but in the end there is nothing you can do about it. I hope that Ernie Wood continues to use his talents. I’d like to see what he could do with a promising future and not a past better left alone.

The principal characters in "One Red Thread" are two couples, one married, the other a pair of singles, but I wouldn't call it a love story. It's more complex and more mature than that. I'd say it's a relationship story. What happens to a couple when one is doing something the other doesn't approve? When one might get hurt? When one is uncovering mysteries that are better left forgotten? But the couples' relationships also extend into the past, to the effect their previous actions--and actions of their family relations all the way back to their great grandparents--have on them today. Revealing this long chain of cause-and-effect events and the characters' relationships to it, the book ultimately asks: If you could change events in the past what would happen? Would you do it? And most important, should you do it? This is a book that gives you a lot to think about. Highly recommended.

This one turned me inside out and upside down. I've read the theories about the new physics and how they see time and dimension differently from classic theories, but it's hard to comprehend in your own head, let alone to turn it into possibility by making into such a rich story full of fascinating characters. Congratulations Mr. Wood. Now I need to rest my head and read something simple and easier to understand.

Ernie Wood's celebration of the past, a past so close in One Red Thread its feels graspable, is lyrical and laconic, wise and sad. Even unsettling. And distinctly Southern. And beautifully written. Eddy and Libby are real to me. You can put One Red Thread in the category, I suppose, of a time travel book. That's fine by me. But mostly this novel is a helluva story - or, to be more accurate, stories. Stories to be savored. Take your time, the livin' is easy ...

Ernie Wood weaves a poetic, suspenseful, and fast moving story that made it difficult to close the book at night.His exquisite words dance on the pages, a true wordsmith who knows how to engage the reader. The characters are multi-dimensional,and just like in real life, I would sometimes be disappointed in their choices, and at other times applauding the direction they were taking.I loved how the story ended. I look forward to reading Ernie Wood's next book.

ORT is a clever, entertaining way of addressing the metaphysical subject of time/space. Wood's endearing character development carries the reader safely through a mind bending journey that often dances precariously close to the edge of abandonment. As a brother Baby Boomer and author, I found familiar energy in these pages. Quite a triumph for one's first novel!

One Red Thread by Ernie Wood – This is a time-travel book about an architect and his family and friends who try to change their lives by altering the past, which is certainly an acceptable time-travel premise. Unfortunately for me, there are far too many pages of boring dialogue and boring thoughts from the characters, and very little gratifying action and accomplishments in this book. I did not find this book to be engrossing, but others might enjoy it.

Beautifully written, this book put me in the middle of the story - great characters with wonderful detail and very interesting time travel component. I loved this book.