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Summary
Summary
This 10th anniversary edition of the beloved #1 New York Times bestseller includes a new introduction and afterword by the author. Chronicling the lifelong friendship between a busy sales executive and a disadvantaged young boy that began with one small gesture of kindness, this is a "ray of hope for a better future, as well as an assurance that love is a stronger force than injustice and inequality" (Sybrina Fulton, mother of Travyon Martin and coauthor of Rest in Power: The Enduring Life of Trayvon Martin ).
Stopping was never part of the plan...
She was a successful ad sales rep in Manhattan. He was a homeless, eleven-year-old panhandler on the street. He asked for spare change; she kept walking. But then something stopped her in her tracks, and she went back. And she continued to go back, again and again. They met up nearly every week for years and built an unexpected, life-changing friendship that has today spanned almost three decades.
Whatever made me notice him on that street corner so many years ago is clearly something that cannot be extinguished, no matter how relentless the forces aligned against it. Some may call it spirit. Some may call it heart. It drew me to him, as if we were bound by some invisible, unbreakable thread. And whatever it is, it binds us still.
Now with new material that brings the life-changing story up to date for its tenth anniversary, An Invisible Thread is "a book capable of restoring our faith in each other and in the very idea that maybe everything is going to be okay after all" (Catherine Ryan Hyde, author of Pay It Forward ).
Author Notes
Laura Schroff is a former advertising sales executive who worked for more than thirty years with several major media companies and publications, including Time Inc. and People. As a keynote speaker at more than three hundred events for schools, charity organizations, libraries, and bookstores, Laura encourages her audience to look for their own invisible thread connections and highlights the importance of opening up their eyes and hearts to the opportunities where they can make a difference in the lives of others. She lives in Westchester, New York, with her feisty poodle, Emma.
Alex Tresniowski is a writer who lives and works in New York. He was a writer for both Time and People magazines, handling mostly human-interest stories. He is the author or coauthor of more than twenty books. For more about this story and the author, please visit AlexTres.com.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
According to an old Chinese proverb, there's an invisible thread that connects two people who are destined to meet and influence each other's lives. With Tresniowski (The Vendetta), Schroff tells how, as a busy advertising sales executive in New York, she easily passed panhandlers every day. One day, 11-year-old Maurice's plea for spare change caused Schroff to turn around and offer to buy him lunch. Thereafter, Schroff and Maurice met for dinner each week and slowly shared their life stories. Maurice's tales about his crack addict mother, absent father, and array of drug-dealing uncles were only part of his desperate longing for a life in a safe neighborhood in an apartment with more than one room. As they grow to depend on each other, Maurice asks Schroff to attend his school's parents' night, where his teacher asks Schroff not to abandon the boy. In some weeks, the meals they share become some of the few he has, because any money his mother might "earn" goes to her habit. As Schroff relates Maurice's story, she tells of her own father's alcoholism and abuse, and readers see how desperately these two need each other in this feel-good story about the far-reaching benefits of kindness. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A straightforward tale of kindness and paying it forward in 1980s New York.When advertising executive Schroff answered a child's request for spare change by inviting him for lunch, she did not expect the encounter to grow into a friendship that would endure into his adulthood. The author recounts how she and Maurice, a promising boy from a drug-addicted family, learned to trust each other. Schroff acknowledges risksincluding the possibility of her actions being misconstrued and the tension of crossing socio-economic dividesbut does not dwell on the complexities of homelessness or the philosophical problems of altruism. She does not question whether public recognition is beneficial, or whether it is sufficient for the recipient to realize the extent of what has been done. With the assistance of People human-interest writer Tresniowski (Tiger Virtues, 2005, etc.), Schroff adheres to a personal narrative that traces her troubled relationship with her father, her meetings with Maurice and his background, all while avoiding direct parallels, noting that their childhoods differed in severity even if they shared similar emotional voids. With feel-good dramatizations, the story seldom transcends the message that reaching out makes a difference. It is framed in simple terms, from attributing the first meeting to "two people with complicated pasts and fragile dreams" that were "somehow meant to be friends" to the conclusion that love is a driving force. Admirably, Schroff notes that she did not seek a role as a "substitute parent," and she does not judge Maurice's mother for her lifestyle. That both main figures experience a few setbacks yet eventually survive is never in question; the story fittingly concludes with an epilogue by Maurice.For readers seeking an uplifting reminder that small gestures matter.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
An Invisible Thread INTRODUCTION The boy stands alone on a sidewalk in Brooklyn and this is what he sees: a woman running for her life, and another woman chasing her with a hammer. He recognizes one woman as his father's girlfriend. The other, the one with the hammer, he doesn't know. The boy is stuck in something like hell. He is six years old and covered in small red bites from chinches--bedbugs--and he is woefully skinny and malnourished. He is so hungry his stomach hurts, but then being hungry is nothing new to him. When he was two years old the pangs got so bad he rooted through the trash and ate rat droppings and had to have his stomach pumped. He is staying in his father's cramped, filthy apartment in a desolate stretch of Brooklyn, sleeping with stepbrothers who wet the bed, surviving in a place that smells like death. He has not seen his mother in three months, and he doesn't know why. His world is a world of drugs and violence and unrelenting chaos, and he has the wisdom to know, even at six, that if something does not change for him soon, he might not make it. He does not pray, does not know how, but he thinks, Please don't let my father let me die. And this thought, in a way, is its own little prayer. And then the boy sees his father come up the block, and the woman with the hammer sees him too, and she screams, "Junebug, where is my son?!" The boy recognizes this voice, and he says, "Mom?" The woman with the hammer looks down at the boy, and she looks puzzled, until she looks harder and finally says, "Maurice?" The boy didn't recognize his mother because her teeth had fallen out from smoking dope. The mother didn't recognize her son because he was so skinny and shriveled. Now she is chasing Junebug and yelling, "Look what you did to my baby!" The boy should be frightened, or confused, but more than anything what the boy feels is happiness. He is happy that his mother has come back to get him, and because of that he is not going to die--at least not now, at least not in this place. He will remember this as the moment when he knew his mother loved him. Excerpted from An Invisible Thread: The True Story of an 11-Year-Old Panhandler, a Busy Sales Executive, and an Unlikely Meeting with Destiny by Laura Schroff, Alex Tresniowski All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Foreword, Ten Years Later | p. xi |
Introduction | p. xxvii |
1 Spare Change | p. 1 |
2 The First Day | p. 7 |
3 One Good Break | p. 17 |
4 The Birthday Present | p. 25 |
5 The Baseball Glove | p. 35 |
6 Is That It? | p. 43 |
7 A Mother's Song | p. 50 |
8 A Fathers Legacy | p. 68 |
9 The Brown Paper Bag | p. 81 |
10 The Big Table | p. 100 |
11 The Missed Appointment | p. 115 |
12 Outside Looking In | p. 125 |
13 Bittersweet Miracle | p. 137 |
14 A Simple Recipe | p. 149 |
15 The New Bicycle | p. 157 |
16 The Winter Coat | p. 175 |
17 The Dark Forest | p. 193 |
18 One Last Test | p. 205 |
19 The Greatest Gift | p. 217 |
Epilogue: Love, Maurice | p. 227 |
Afterword, Ten Years Later | p. 233 |
Acknowledgments, Ten Years Later | p. 241 |