I love Anne Tyler’s masterful storytelling and this book was a great example of it - I enjoyed becoming fully immersed in a family’s life.

The book starts with Serena traveling with a boyfriend when she meets a cousin at the train station and starts reflecting on why they aren’t closer - with the story we zoom back a couple of generations and get vignettes and little scenes of a family life, of challenges and regrets, conventional and unconventional choices and plain lies and lies of omission and bit by bit we get back full circle to where we started. This was a fast read for me, I found myself engaged and invested even though a lot of time and family members get covered in just 250odd pages …

French Braid, the title is a metaphor for family - “You think you’re free of them, but you’re never really free; the ripples are crimped in forever.”

This book was different for me from others meaning its writing and narrating style is not like the usual books that I've read. However, it grabbed my attention, the story revolves around The Garretts family going through their lives within multiple years and generations portraying the meaning of family and sisterhood and how every one of them is so different from the other showing us their beliefs and opinions throughout time. We get to see stages of their lives as children, teenagers, and then adults as husbands and wives then grandfathers/mothers with grandkids while showing us how people can change and how life changes and how sometimes we grow apart from each other living our lives and leaving our parents behind feeling lonely and missing us and the time we were kids and under one roof altogether.

In short, it wasn't one of the best that I've read but it was a different experience and I enjoyed it somehow.
For those who like this kind of book go grab your copies.

Anne Tyler once again wrote a mesmerizing family saga, filled with so many moments where I literally clutched my heart in despair or empathy as I read. This may be my favorite novel of hers in years, a brilliant, compassionate study of family relationships and how the ties that bind can feel suffocating but also, on some level, comforting. I would give it ten stars if I could!

French Braid is a multi-generational story of the Garrett family. Starting in the 1950s up to our pandemic present, the novel reflects on this intriguing family from the perspectives of the differing family members.

Full of love, humor and heartbreak, this was really a great read! If you love character development, family dramas and a big cast of characters, you’ll love this one. This was my first time reading Anne Tyler and I enjoyed her writing style so much, I plan on getting some of her backlist too!

#netgalley #knopfpublishing #frenchbraid #annetyler

Happy Pub Day Anne Tyler

Mini Review

If you are a fan of family drama and character driven stories, you will love this book

French Braid centers around the Garret Family set in Baltimore, spanning decades and generations from the 1950s to present day. I found that I really lost myself in all the family dynamics and related to multiple characters and their struggles and triumphs. I loved how at the center of it all was love and acceptance and much of what Tyler writes everyone can relate to.

If you liked Claire Lombado’s The Most Fun We Ever Had you will appreciate this book.

I loved this book!

French Braid tells the story of the Garrett family. The matriarch, Mercy, makes some unconventional choices in regards to her family. She refuses to completely sacrifice her happiness and sense of self for her husband, children, and grandchildren.
The story loops away from Mercy’s perspective and the family takes turns giving the reader their insight into their family and themselves.
French Braid is absolutely beautiful and poetic. It reminds us that for all we think we know about who we are and where we came from, there are many other truths. It also shows us that we are always connected to our family, even if those connections are hard to see.

A well written story that is relatively boring. It’s actually a fast read because you’re hoping something interesting happens. While that doesn’t sound enjoyable, it is actually like a having a green smoothie for lunch. At the end, you are nourished but not quite satisfied. Thank you NetGalley for the ARC.

In my twenties, I read a ton of Anne Tyler. If you had asked 25-year-old me who my favorite author was, she would have been my pick, probably without hesitation. I can name you five or six Tyler books that I loved, whose existence changed me.

At that time, twenty-five year old me read nothing but contemporary fiction (or, as I am sure my younger, more pretentious self would have called it, contemporary literature). I was smart, a little over-educated, and thought…not that I was too good for genre, but that genre wasn’t quite good enough for me.

All that changed in 1994, on the way to Florida, when I grabbed a Julie Smith book on the way to the airport and my twenty+ year love affair with mysteries and thrillers was born.

So, it’s interesting, from the perspective of someone who has read little but books that have propulsive plots, have things happening on every page, have sex and violence and cliffhangers in abundance…it’s interesting to step back into a world that I have largely left behind. The world of the closely-examined life, the world where the detail of what is scrawled into the side panel of a clock will be called back to as a metaphor for the disconnect between parents and their children. A world where the most mundane details are exquisitely rendered as a way of calling attention to their ordinariness.

Anne Tyler brilliantly calls attention to our ordinariness, to our sameness. To our shared foibles, our shared humanity.

Nothing much happens in this book. There’s a family, a husband and his wife, an artist, who tamps down her wanderlust to raise a family, although never quite as successfully as she thinks. There are their three children, so different from one another that their DNA provides the only tenuous connection, a connection that will weaken further with time. The grandchildren who, as adults, can barely remember each others’ names. The life events that shape them. Weddings, births, graduations. The inheritance of a leather recliner is treated with as much consequence in an Anne Tyler book as a golden anniversary, and in many ways, that is justified. Anne Tyler books are all about the minutiae, the tiny parts of daily living that weave together into a life.

And here is the thing, the real crux. I don’t read books like this anymore. I have become dependent on things happening in the books I read, addicted to the endorphin high of an explosive resolution, of a cleverly-crafted ending, the unreliability of a suspicious narrator. Anne Tyler does not give me the dopamine hit that Robert Crais does, or Lee Child, or Harlan Coben.

But that does not mean that Anne Tyler is not a brilliant writer. She is, and spending a day with her every once in a while, meditating on the human condition is a lovely, contemplative exercise. I would do well to remember that.

Recommended for anyone who has ever been part of a family.

French Braid by Anne Tyler is a quirky family saga set in Baltimore. I have been a fan of Anne Tyler for many years and always look forward to her next book with great eagerness. This book did not let me down, although I had a hard time getting used to the characters at first. However, I have learned to trust this author and carry on with her books. Ultimately, I enjoyed the book and found myself touched by the facets of each character, warts and all. Like all of Tyler’s characters, these are not beautiful perfect people, but flawed like most folks. At the end of the book, the reader feels the sense of having gone on a journey with this family and gotten to know them intimately. I especially liked the relationships between the generations.
Thank you very much to Knopf Doubleday and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this ARC in exchange for an honest opinion.

French Braid was my first novel by Anne Tyler and I thoroughly enjoyed it! I really loved the author’s use of dialect. It felt so real and natural to read. Each chapter is kind of a short story from a different family member within the Garrett family. Some chapters are within a short time frame, and some take place decades later but each chapter talks you through a pivotal moment in time for each character within the family. Some family members struggle with independence, some struggle with human interaction, some struggle with practicality, some struggle with feelings and some struggle with expressing themselves. Each family member adds a complex layer to the family and it shows you how the test of time can shape a family forever

French Braid, the new novel by veteran author Anne Tyler, is a warm and perceptive American family saga, spanning four generations and seven decades. Here we are introduced to the Garrett family: Robin and his wife Mercy, and their three children Alice, Lily, and David. There is nothing extraordinary about this Baltimore family: Robin, a practical man who owns a plumbing supply store, doesn’t like spending money on vacations or fancy dinners, Mercy loves painting and dreams of an artist’s life on her own terms, Alice is the sensible, overbearing, and highly organized oldest daughter while Lily is chaotic and flighty, a magnet for trouble. David is a sensitive soul who challenges his family’s expectations, mainly by avoiding his parents and sisters as much as he can. The characters age, they bicker, they reunite, and seemingly trivial events have far reaching consequences, shaping the family for several generations.

There is no single turning point in the novel, but rather multiple little grudges and secrets, separations and reunions, unexpected moments of recognition and tenderness, and a yearning for home and family, in all its different forms, carry the narrative forward. As the novel moves from the 1950s through each decade until 2020, each section focuses on a particular family member—a parent, a child, a grandchild—and decade, shifting and reframing our perspective on events in the past. We also see how quickly time passes, and how carefree childhood becomes adulthood and middle age in the blink of an eye. Tyler is just as good at capturing an argument over a bikini in 1959 as the tender sadness of two grandparents, touching their grandson’s tiny cloth mask in 2020.

A remarkable and comforting celebration of the little details that make up our everyday sorrows and joys by an 80-year old writer who has brought so many families to life on the page. Fans of Anne Tyler’s previous family sagas will rejoice at this fine little novel. Highly recommended!

Many thanks to NetGalley and Knopf Doubleday for allowing me to read an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

Enjoyed reading about the Garrett Family through the years and from each family member's perspective. One event can be seen differently by each family member.

I requested to read and review this book for free from Alfred A. Knop a division of Penguin Random House. This book takes a family and how life goes by in some ways quickly and slowly. How they each find things in life. Sometimes the things in our past can shape our future. We each can view something differently. All families have their strength and weak eases. Sometimes we get so caught up in the present we forget things in the past. Ae always think our families will be there and life Sometimes takes you on your own journey. This book is for any type of reader and can be read anywhere.

Tyler covers the Garret family from the 1950s through to present day. The Garrett family occupies the same real estate in the early parts of the book, but each member of the family appears to be in his or her own orbit. They take one family vacation and each person goes their separate ways. As the children grow, Mercy, an artist, loses herself in her own life to the neglect of her children. Robin, her husband, tries to be both mother and father to his children and understands them not at all. Mercy eventually moves out to live her own life and Robin covers up for her, not letting anyone know that she no longer lives at home. The children rarely touch base with the parents, as they are busy living their own lives. The title comes from a description of a French braid for the hair, that when the braid comes out, the hair still has the crinkles from the braid. Tyler likens this to the Garrett families.

This story is probably representative of many families today, each person just living in their own little universe, with little regard for anyone else.

I loved this book! It was like coming home. The book is not unlike any other family story, but it kept me reading until the end. You become nostagic, engrossed in the character's flaws, and their love for each other despite their differences. It brought me to reminiscing on my own family and how time passes us by so very quickly. We can lose sight of how each generation connects us to the next. This is the first time I have read a book by Anne Tyler, but I am spurred to read her other works. Thank you for the opportunity.

I made it about 50% and had to give up. I love a character driven family drama, but this one felt kind of disconnected, and I didn't really care about the characters. There was really not much happening, but I didn't feel like I was connecting with anyone in particular or getting to know them more as people. I think I'm an outlier, if you like family stories, check this out.

I found myself intrigued by the way one person in a family can effect how all members in a family interact with one another and that effected how they interact with those outside the family circle. It was kind of sad to me that one member of the family was so detached from all the others and I wonder why that person even got married, because he/she definitely wanted nothing to do with how others in the family were doing, including the one they married. However, even though the person effected all the others in the family, the other members of the family were more inclusive and lived more normal lives and found others that loved them.
I found the telling of the story to be very inclusive and involved and I couldn't put the book down because I kept wondering what else was going to happen. I was waiting for the one character to embrace the people that loved them but they never did, but some how the family members found that kindness in others. The one person I was hoping would find love was Robin but it didn't seem that he did.

I want to thank Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Knopf and NetGalley for the advance copy of the novel

The French Braid by Anne Tyler is a wonderful reminder of why Tyler stands near the top of the list of America's most cherished authors. The Garrett family of five are at the heart of this novel. They live in Tyler's beloved city of Baltimore and the reader is treated to their joys and challenges over many decades. Relationships among the Garrett's ebb and flow throughout the years. Tyler conveys that sometimes a family is more about connection than closeness. Reading The French Braid is a joy and Tyler's quirky characters are fascinating. Her words engage and comfort her reader simultaneously. The French Braid is a superb novel.

In the final chapters of this introspective family drama, family is described as the ripples left in hair after undoing a French Braid “…you’re never really free; the ripples are crimped in forever.”

In the first chapter, we meet Serena Drew on a train trip with her boyfriend. Her idiosyncrasies are clear but the reasons for them are not until we learn the history of the Garrett family which begins on a vacation trip in the summer of 1959. The Garretts are vacationing together for the first time but “ a passerby would never guess the Garretts knew each other.” That dynamic continues as the three children, Alice, Lily and David grow up and have families of their own. Their parents, Mercy and Robin, also live separate lives: Mercy’s in reality and Robin’s internal. The weakness is their inability to communicate while they live vividly in their imaginations. Alice Tyler is able to breath life and color into the most mundane scenes: a boy playing with toy soldiers, a surprise party, a train ride…even the overstayed visit of an unwanted cat. French Braid is about families, about how love keeps them precariously together, crimped in forever. French Braid is a gift. Thank you, Anne Tyler. 5 stars.

Thank you to NetGalley, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group and Anne Tyler for this ARC.

French Braid has a lot of the hallmarks of a typical Anne Tyler novel - Baltimore setting, complicated family relationships presented with a wry sense of humor. Having read most of Ms. Tyler's previous novels, and really loving some of her classics, while her familiar cadence was comforting, this one left me a little perplexed. Told from a number of perspectives and time periods spanning three generations of the Garrett family, the children, and grandchildren of Robin and Mercy. We immediately learn in the first chapter that their children Alice, Lily, and David are not geographically distant, though have raised their families so isolated from one another that Lily's daughter Serena barely recognizes her first cousin Nicholas when she encounters him in a train station. We meet a number of other members of the family, and spend the most time with Mercy after her children have grown, who was decidedly the least likable character, and unsure if she was intended to be. I failed to draw the connection between the other characters the author decided to have us spend time with throughout the rest of the novel. The reference to french braids made toward the end by David, seemed a bit forced and awkward as explanation not entirely satisfying.

This may be a good cozy warm blanket read for Anne Tyler completionists, and while we're fortunate she's still writing at 80, this doesn't rise nearly to the level of her earlier works. It pains me, but 2.75 stars, rounded up.

Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher and author for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.