I’m afraid I didn’t enjoy this one. It was bleak and unfortunately I found it boring. There was a lot of scope for things to happen but nothing really did. The family should definitely spend Christmas apart! A lot of information was provided at the beginning but little really happened and I found it a read that made me feel sad.

Well, this was an odd one. I had to restart it three times as I initially found it very hard to get into and at one point I made up my mind to give up reading it as it seemed to be going nowhere. But it gradually grew on me and in the end I really enjoyed it on the whole. Frank and Joan have been married for 35 years. Frank is an architect who has produced wonderful houses for other people but just as the cobbler's children always go unshod, his own houses remain unfinished. They live in the Alps in a house which has numerous dangers, an open swimming pool, live wires sticking out of walls, things to trip over. Frank spends his time researching into place names in France and recently he has started to correspond with an ex girlfriend. Joan of course has found out about this and is thinking of leaving him. Meanwhile their three children and assorted spouses and grandchildren are due to arrive home for the first family Christmas for five years. They too have their own secrets and this all adds to the tension. The relationships are brilliantly described but there are parts of the novel which are confusing, notably the inclusion of Lois' (one of their daughters) poetry at various stages. I didn't get this at all and tended to skip through it. What I did get and absolutely loved was Simon the dog. I usually hate narratives which give the points of view of animals or other odd things (Joanne Harris, Blackberry Wine is a case in point. That starts with a bottle of wine's point of view and I hated it). But this was spot on. We are treated to Simon's thoughts on Lois with whom he has fallen in love and it is hilarious. The part where he contemplates suicide and how he would do it and then decides not to because he is diverted by the thought of rolling in the grass is just brilliant. So, an odd read, a different read but one that is worth sticking with.

An interesting book about family interactions. How traditions develop over years and how even as adults we reminisce about actions and traditions in different ways. Very descriptive and imaginative.

I did not enjoy this book at all. It seemed to be disjointed and fragmented. There was no true thread through it apart from the common ground of a family meeting for Christmas in the French Alps which attracted me to it in the first place. To be honest it wouldn't actually matter where it was set. All the characters seemed self absorbed with their own lives and unable to truly communicate. The book never really seemed to get going, although some passage one felt that the text was going somewhere but it just jumped about indeterminately and at several points it wasn't apparent whose story the book was following and just seemed to grab at random thoughts as much as anything. Even the dog took part which I found bizarre. The whole thing just didn't hang together and I only finished it through sheer determination.

Would definitely recommend this book as it looks at family relationships and how they interact.

I did not like this one. Again, I've done so badly with fiction books this month and all of this has just left me feeling kind of rubbish about books that are coming out in the near future. I received this as an e-arc from Netgalley, which I am very grateful for, but this book just failed to even pique my interest. I got through the first 40% of the book, and there was absolutely nothing that was making me want to read it, or even go back to it.

Initially, I was drawn to this book because it was set in France, concerning family issues and interesting conflicts, which I am always up for. However, I know that these stories can be done well or they can be done incredibly boringly. Unfortunately, this book was the latter. It flits from multiple perspectives, all written in the third person- even including the family dog, Simon- and every time I tried to pick it up, I felt like I was forcing myself to keep reading it, purely to ensure I got a review out.

This book would definitely appeal to a certain kind of person. Someone who likes very detailed prose and complex family dramas that become increasingly complicated to follow because they're all so very similar. I just found myself not caring about this book, not caring about the characters or even the plot. Nothing had me wanting to keep reading.

So, this was a pretty terrible book for me and it sucks because I've just had the worst luck with fiction this month and it feels like a really awful month to be reading. Sadly.

Frank and Joan have been together for thirty five years, they have three children; Lois, Maya and William, two grandchildren Gitsy and Finn and a dog, Simon. For the first time in five years the whole family will be reunited for Christmas in their family home in the French Alps, with several of their relationships struggling the books follows their attempt to pull together for a perfect family Christmas.

I ended up giving this two stars, I was expecting a bit more to happen but this is essentially a book about people and their relationships, not a lot actually happens. A lot of information is thrown at you in the first part of the book, a lot of characters and their occasionally multiple relationships are introduced in quite quick succession with quite a few flashbacks which aren't obviously flashbacks at first, at which point I was mainly confused and close to giving up.

This settled down and the majority of the book bumbled along quite enjoyably, the character development is great, they are all well thought out, realistic, flawed people. The tension between some characters gradually starts to build and I had three or four different theories about who would discover what about who or drop someone else in it and so on, but then I realised that I was about 95% of the way through on my kindle and there wasn't really time for any of that to happen.

If you enjoy character and relationships focused books then definitely give this one a go, there quite a few thought provoking morality based scenarios/questions to tangent on. Main highlights for me included Gitsy, the five year old who plans to stay up to 'catch' Santa by fuelling up on clementines and Simon (the dog) contemplating how he would go about committing suicide while simultaneously wondering if he actually wants to or if he just wants to go for a walk.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing an uncorrected proof in exchange for an honest review.

'Stories We Tell Ourselves' is a family saga set in a French home during the Christmas holidays. Frank and Joan's three grown up children are returning home for the holidays, and bringing with them all of their own problems. Wim is quiet and withdrawn, Maya is cheating on her husband with a woman, and Lois's marriage is hanging by a thread after an affair and a miscarriage. Not to mention that Joan has recently discovered that her husband Frank is back in touch with his ex girlfriend from 40 years ago.

All of these threads of drama come together in one house, and the drama inevitably comes to a head.

It's a well-written book which would appeal to fans of 'The Family Stone', however I found the character POV and perspective-hopping a little jarring: the narrative swaps from character to character very quickly and within chapters, and at times we even get inside the head of the (very surprisingly humanesque) family dog, which is cute but unexpected and jarring.

All in all, an entertaining read but not something I'd read again.

A pleasant enough read, short and easy to mentally digest.

The author utilises multiple narrators, chopping and changing quite rapidly, so we hop around somewhat. This style is easy enough to follow, though occasionally it only becomes clear who is narrating a section part way through or as it draws to a close.

However, I was honestly expecting more, given that I chose this novel from a Literary Fiction selection.

'Stories We Tell Ourselves' is a fairly standard tale of a family drawn together over Christmas and their thoughts/feelings about their various relationships - with each other, plus friends, family and lovers past/present (in some cases potentially future).

The subject matter seems to me to have been given rather light treatment, which might (potentially) have gained more depth had the novel been longer, or if the author had not tried to squeeze so many characters, narrators, feelings and events into the small space she chose to use. The story truly does read like a brief snapshot of real lives, so in that sense is probably completely successful... but is simply not enough for me.

It didn't get anywhere close to eliciting any kind of emotional connection, attachment or response to even a single character (not even Simon the dog). For me, while a lighter touch like this can still be well written and suit it's purpose admirably, a good novel ideally needs to make me feel - deeply (the best will make me sob and hold tightly onto thoughts of it's characters and storytelling for a long time after reading).

Nor did I find anything new or stimulating involved in the author's use of language, form, character or concept, which for me might still have placed the novel into the Literary Fiction category.

Perhaps classification could be rethought, as (in my opinion) this story would be much more suited to being described as 'Women's Fiction' or a 'Holiday Read'.

A story about a family coming together for Christmas. Frank and Joan co-exist in their partially complete home and look forward to their grown-up children arriving. Each person had their own viewpoint on the past and these are laid out in this novel. I was totally perplexed with the narration form the dog’s point of view.
The emotional interactions all feel flat and I wonder if this is due to the translation?

Frank and Joan's marriage is in trouble, they live in a house somewhere in Europe (seemingly Brittany, but it seems hardly anybody speaks fluent French) and their three kids are coming home for the holidays. Daughters Lois and Maya are both unhappy at their respective homes - despite being married to Nick who comes home with just-because flowers, and unanimously agreed upon as perfect Cole - and son Wim promptly breaks up with his girlfriend next-door upon his arrival. There were a lot of extramarital affairs mentioned, and keeping track of all the relationship problems in all the different houses was complicated by constant flashbacks to prior problems in former houses (Frank fixes houses up professionally).

Sarah Françoise writes smart and funny; I loved the refrences to matryoshka-izing of Frank's laptop, Friedrich's Chalk Cliffs on Rügen, and the perspective of Simon, Frank's dog. There were too many brilliantly innovative turns of phrases to even mention here, but I look forward to reading more from this writer.

It's not quite the Christmas relatives gathering from hell - but it comes close ! In this sharp yet affectionate look at family relationships under stress. I found the style of narration from multiple viewpoints rather confusing at first, until the individual characters emerged, but I gradually became engaged with the shifting family dynamics. I particularly liked the family in-jokes and traditional Yuletide lore, like the ‘mystery Calvados’ that was a present from an uncle in Normandy and never opened. There is also a wincingly funny description of taking a young child to the loo whilst also coping with a toddler that every parent will relate to. Simon the dog with human thoughts was a whimsy too far for me, and the constant mention of ‘salt’ became annoyingly repetitive and puzzling till the final passages – but these were not so off putting as to spoil my enjoyment of this author’s off-beat style.

This book had so much potential and seemed to change direction whilst I was reading it - and sadly not for the better.

Confused and disjointed and sadly none of the characters 'did' anything - the best one was Simon the Dog - the concept of writing 'chapters' as the dog I loved, sadly the rest of the book was not paced enough for me.

The grandfather, two daughters and dog in a family are all having affairs, some physical and some over the internet. They meet up over Christmas with their respective partners and feel guilty or long for their illicit loved one.

The book examines the relationships between the family members and how their affairs affect the other parties. Ultimately Frank's (the grandfather) unhealthy eating, lack of exercise and guilt lead to him having a heart attack. However I didn't feel too upset by this, he had become so insular and rude to his wife that I felt he probably needed a shock to the system.

I finished the book but it didn't fill me with any great emotion