Usual warm involving read from Anne Tyler.
Loved this, she just says it as it is, no judgements, just human frailties and their consequences.
The differences in dress, attitudes and womens roles are illustrated in this novel moving from 1940's to the present day.
Starting with Serena meeting her cousin at a railway station then going back to the families origins, I made a family tree to help me remember. All of the family have their endearing qualities and strange quirks. Alice is the grounded one, Lilly the wild unpredictable one and David the adored baby, parents Robin and Mercy marry and struggle along with parenthood and being a couple. Full of surprises not least the Grandchildren with their strong modern ways.
Thank you Anne and NetGalley

I do like Ann Tyler! Such lovely perceptive writing, never over sensational, always believable and she handles dialogue so beautifully. Exactly what I needed to read just now.

I’ve always enjoyed Anne Tyler’s novels which are so good at depicting family relationships in small town America, in fact usually they are set in Baltimore as this one is.
French Braid is the story of the Garret family from the 1950s right through to the present day and the Pandemic. As in all Anne Tyler books there is not much of a plot- it is the characters themselves who are important.
The author examines each of the characters in minute detail, from Robin and Mercy, the matriarch and patriarch, right through to Nicholas and Serena and their young families. There are some key points such as a holiday by the lake when Robin and Mercy’s children are young and a trip to New York when Candle accompanies her grandmother but otherwise it is the minutiae of family life.
I was hard pushed to work out how the title related to the book but this is revealed at the end- it’s the connections between family members that are still there even after people move far away..”that’s how families work too. You think you’re free of them, but you’re never really free: the ripples are crimped in forever”
This is a charming family story which is cleverly crafted as well as being completely up to date. The separate sections relating to different family members are all connected and reflect the theme of the book.
Mercy’s desire for her own life and the need to escape reminded me of an early book by this author, Ladder of Years. However I did find that Mercy was a rather self centred character- she was so focused on herself that she could not see how much she was loved by her husband and how much her own children needed her even after they were grown up themselves. This came to a head when she was asked to adopt a cat- she no longer wanted any responsibilities- she only wanted to look after herself.
Definitely recommended to both Anne Tyler fans as well as those readers who like a well written family story.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for my arc.

So enjoyed this one. A story where not much happens yet everything happens. My own family is just as disjointed so perhaps it resonated with me! By the end it was easy to see how and why this could have happened. All the characters seemed plausible and relatable. This was my first Anne Tyler. Next time I am at the bookshop, I will look for more of her work.. i want more! With many thanks.

A new Anne Tyler is always something I look forward to. Such a consistently good author, even into her late seventies and eighties. She writes with clarity, humour and wisdom about early family relationships that form individual experiences. The image of the French braid illustrates how our lives are plaited together with our families. You might think you can leave it all behind you but, even if the braid is released, the ripples and waves are still there. Anne Tyler writes about ordinary Baltimore characters with ordinary lives, but renders them extraordinary and moving. I loved this book.

Anne Tyler is one of my favourite authors so its always great to get approved for a netgalley.
French Braid tells the tale of Merry & Robin and their 3 children. When the kids leave home Merry unofficially moves into her studio where she paints - its unspoken amonst the family that she has moved out. It reminded me a little of ladder of years which is one of my favouraiet Anne Tylers. Her ability to write about families is second to none.

Another lovely step into the lives of a Baltimore family. This is Tyler's bread and butter. This time around a chance sighting at a railway station provides the launch point for the story of the Garrett family from the 1950’s, right up the present day. The book revolves around a family holiday in 1959, a holiday that defined many of the relationships within the family, whether it was realised or not. As with many of Tyler's novels, not a great deal really happens, but that is kind of the point. She has always been more about drawing characters and exploring relationships. There are few better at doing it, and this is no exception. Another great novel.

I received an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author Anne Tyler.
I really enjoy all of Tyler's books, her writing style is beautiful and incredibly involving, you always get completely swept up in her stories and with each of the characters.
She writes about the extraordinary events of ordinary people's lives, and brings great beauty and depth to the minutiae. Would highly recommend, 5 stars.

We meet a young couple on a train, coming back from meeting his parents. Something about their conversation makes me think this is the 1950s, she’s not keen on staying over without being married and meeting the in-laws is quite formal. It’s only when he pulls out his phone to read I realise that it’s contemporary. She thinks she spots a cousin but can’t tell, she’s not seen him for years. He’s incredulous that she doesn’t know, her family isn’t that big, after all. This gentle competition is what Anne Tyler does well - describes the rhythm of family life, of human contact, without drama or hyperbole.

The plot swirls around Robin and Mercy, the central mother and father with their three children, and then their children, blossoming out like circles in a pond. Two of the grandchildren are called Robin (a boy and a girl) which is just the kind of quirky detail which makes you as the reader question the decision but also sets the story in real life - that’s what people do, they make weird choices which are self-serving. That question, by the way, is also pondered by the characters.

While nothing momentous happens, the story of each person in the family, knitted together like a cosy quilt, pulls them into focus so by the end we know who the Garretts are, or were. I liked none of them, to be honest, and I wouldn’t make friends with them - but I might like to sit and have a cup of tea or a glass of wine next to their dinner table. Sibling rivalry, your own priorities taking precedence over your family’s and pleasing yourself, struggling to establish who you are in the world when your family keep putting you in the box you’ve been in since you were five and fell into the river and got the nickname’ wet socks’.

I puzzled over why it was called French Braid. Maybe it’s a slightly old fashioned hairstyle, or that it’s quite formal and restrictive and at odds with the free spirit characters we meet. Maybe it’s because there are three children and they knot together to make a whole.

A classic Anne Tyler, spare and somehow packed with detail and nuance which will remain with you and prompt your own wondering about your own family.

I have to say though, I couldn’t forgive Mercy for what she did to Desmond.

Thanks for the DRC, Chatto & Windus and thanks as always to Netgalley. Available to buy, now!

I was so excited to get an ARC of French Braid by Anne Tyler because I love her writing style. She manages to draw you in completely to the stories of ordinary families.

This book follows the Garrett family, parents Robin and Mercy and their three children; Alice, Lily and David. We learn of the family dynamics starting with a family holiday and going forward to the parents 50th wedding anniversary. As always the characters are believable and interesting. I particularly liked the relationship between Mercy and her granddaughter Candle.

I loved the quote "That's how families work too. You think you are free of them but you are never really free; the ripples are crimped in forever."

A wonderful, poignant story of an average American family but it could be any family. Shows true insight ,warmth and understanding, a sheer joy of a read. My thanks to Netgalley for my copy.

To be honest this book didn't grab me. I kept waiting for something noteworthy to happen but it just continued in the same steady vein..
It did tell the story of the family, covering many years and so could be regarded as successful in that way. Many readers loved its gentle tale of the various family members going by the number of five star reviews but I felt that I just wanted something more. It didn't help that I didn't take to the matriarch of the family. Mercy,

Anne Tyler's distinctive style carries this story as with her orevious novels. Her eye for detail and the minutae of family life are described so well that we live along side this family and we care what happens to them the Garretts of Baltimore. It should be tedious even boring but the author manages to pique our interest skipping years between chapters and making us thirsty to know what has happened to family nembers in the intervening years. She casually drips the information in giving us no chance to grieve for a death or celebrate a birth but focusing on the present and the future.
So many scenarios are familiar to us the reader, first holiday, first love, family rivalries, the fight for space and independence but they come and go with minimal drama often leaving us with questions much as in real life where all the ends are rarely neatly tied up and important questions never get voiced
The title French Braid is symbolic of the tight knit family bond we grow up with which, whether we like it or not, moulds and affects us most of our lives. As the bonds loosen we unconsciously retain the kinks and behaviours we were raised with just as hair which has been released from a tight braid. A true and vivid analogy which fits this family story very well.

I’ve been a fan of Anne Tyler for many years, the Accidental Tourist is one of my favourite books. I love the way she manages to describe the seemingly humdrum nature of every day family interactions in an insightful and engaging way, and her latest book is no exception.

French Braid tells the story of the Garrett family from the 1950s right up to current pandemic times. Matriarch Mercy Garrett and her husband Robin are the lynchpins of the family, but even they can’t heal the deep rifts which develop between their children and lead to them becoming estranged in later life. The book opens with their granddaughter Serena running into her estranged cousin Nicholas at a train station, unsure at first whether it really is him as they haven’t seen each other for many years, and from there the story delves back into Garrett family history to uncover a compelling and familiar tale of ordinary family life.

I did feel the book sagged a little around the middle, and while all the characters were believable and astutely described I couldn’t quite warm to the central character Mercy (probably because of what she did to the cat!), but overall Anne Tyler is still the queen of the every day family saga and long may she reign.

Comforting, as every book by Anne Tyler I have read before. We follow three generations of the Garrett family, the grandparents Robin and Mercy, their children Alice, Lily and David, and their grandchildren. I found it calming and lovely in its ordinariness... People get married, raise children, occasionally divorce, lose contact, reconnect. The book starts with one of the grandchildren, Serena, and then goes back to the grandparents and works chronologically, starting with a family holiday in 1959. I kept waiting for a big revelation, reading between the lines, and found it somewhat lacking. Mercy, the grandmother, was the most developed and most interesting character; I regretted that some of the grandchildren appear so little and towards the end that it felt pointless, and it felt like remembering where they fitted was an effort: who is Eddie? Who is Serena again?
But overall a comforting read, the writing reads like someone showing you a family album, and Anne Tyler has a special talent for conveying mundane family moments in a very touching manner.

I'd not read anything by Anne Tyler before...and sadly cannot say I'll be enthused to try another... It's about a family through generations but beyond that I'd struggle to elaborate. This book didn't reel me in and left me with some disillusionment, having previously hearing only good things about Anne Tyler's books. I do have A Spool of Blue Thread on my bookshelf but maybe this will sit there a little longer... Didn't reach my high hopes I'm afraid...
Many thanks to Netgalley for my copy, this is my unbiased opinion.

I really love Anne Tyler's books and particularly enjoyed A Spool of Blue Thread and French Braid is equally as enjoyable as that was. When reading Anne's books it's almost as if you've met an old friend you haven't seen for years and they are updating you with all that's happened in their family since you last met. An easy and very enjoyable read. I look forward to the author's next book.

Anne Tyler is such a renowned and accomplished author that when I came to read 'French Braid' I was convinced I had previously read her work. I mean, I must have done, surely? But no, it turns out I haven’t. But what a great writer she is. It takes a genius to write about ‘ordinary’ family life, with no major, astounding events (nobody gets murdered, nothing even requiring a suspension of belief arises) and yet still be a gripping and profound novel.

Each character feels fully realised and their interactions natural and believable. Yet, the painstaking (and ridiculous) detailing of minutia in the paintings of Mercy, the mother of the story, expresses exactly how the story of this family is presented and to be fair, how most people view the past – almost all is indistinct, but there will always be specific events or locations that stick in our memories with minute details and it is this that forms our view of ourselves and others.

This is a wonderful book that never preaches but shows us so much and is full of such subtle occurrences and metaphors that reveal themselves long after the book is concluded. This is what fiction can be.

A tale of a family, but I felt it was a wasted couple of days ploughing through it. Really didn't see the point. Strange family relationships but no real explanation for this. I thought we'd find out why David was estranged from the family but in the end he didn't feel he was. A very strange family. Wife who moves out of the family home, husband of 50 years in denial celebrating their golden wedding. No communication, nobody seems to like each other. A sad tale. #netgalley #FrenchBraid

French Braid begins in 2010 as a young couple return on a train from a family visit, discussing their different backgrounds and how they have been shaped by them. This leads into the story of the Garrett family, told over three generations, beginning in the fifties and ending during the pandemic.

Each chapter relates a different event and period. The key Tyler ingredients are here. There are family secrets and rivalries, awkward get-togethers, tensions and estrangements, precious moments of connection.

It begins with a holiday by a lake in 1959. The party are an apparently ill-matched couple in Mercy and Robin Garrett, and their three children. Mercy loves to paint and is absorbed in her inner life, Robin is practical and conventional. Their three children are equally unalike, so that teenager Alice thinks an observer of them on the beach would assume they were strangers, each having a dramatically different experience in the same space.

Through the generations of the Garrett family, attitudes change, people die, are born, marry, divorce, but patterns recur – hence the slightly laboured analogy of the ripples left by a French braid after the hair is untied. Tyler captures the oddity of family life, where people who may have little in common are forced into close quarters, like strangers clinging to the same life raft.

Tyler’s books are sometimes about dark events – unhappy families, humiliations, stark and sudden losses – and sometimes they are more humorous as they explore human foibles and our inability to connect. (Of course, I’m simplifying, many of her books combine elements of both.)

French Braid, though, for me sits uneasily in the middle. There are no great dramas, but nor did it make me laugh. The chapters didn’t have the neat sense of completeness of linked stories (as used to great effect by Elizabeth Strout), nor was there a strong narrative arc pulling you forward.

I wonder if Tyler was enjoying wrongfooting the reader. There are a few points where she sets up situations which suggest a dramatic outcome but which instead lead to more prosaic ups and downs. After all, these are the lives most of us live, most of the time.

Not my favourite Anne Tyler novel, then, but if like me you’re a fan, you’ll probably enjoy returning to her world.
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I received a copy of French Braid from the publisher via Netgalley.