Does anyone else write realistic human relationships like Anne Tyler? I don't think so. These characters are real people in my mind, so expertly they are drawn. I liked them and also didn't like them, and they felt fully like my neighbors and friends- you learn to take the good with the bad, the negative with the positive, as you see their humanity and allow them to see yours.

This read like a collection of shorts stories about a single family. I enjoyed parts of it and appreciated the way the characters mirrored a typical family with all of its complications and flaws. Overall, I enjoyed it, but I didn't really care for any of the characters except David, so I had a hard time identifying with them. The story about David's family and the pandemic was my favorite and really captured the little intricacies of that crazy time period.

I love the cover of this book so much. It totally drew me in and made me request it. Sadly, the old adage is true: you can't judge a book by it's cover. This is a very quick read and I almost DNFed it because the first chapter was just so odd. It takes place in 2010, but it read like the 1950s (other than the mention of a cell phone.) The language was so dated. I decided to push on since it was such a short book and it did improve, but mostly because a lot of the book took place in the past and the language matched up. There really is no point to this book. There isn't a plot. Each chapter focuses on a different member of this very disconnected family over the years. It reads more like a collections of short stories rather than a novel. It was a pretty depressing read that left me with a jaded view of people and families that I was eager to move on from and shake off.

French Braid
Anne Tyler
Fiction
Nancy
5

At seventeen Alice is the oldest of the Garrett children (ahead of Lily, fifteen, and David, seven) when her family take their first (and only) vacation, in spite of the fact that the only one to embrace the idea is their mother, Mercy. The teenagers are past the age of looking forward to time with their parents, David is afraid of being forced to learn to swim, and dad Robin has never understood what to do with himself if he isn’t running the hardware store. Regardless, the five of them spend an interminable week in 1959 at Deep Creek Lake where each of them acts exactly as they do at home in Baltimore: Alice takes on the responsibility for the practical work of managing things, Lily finds a boy to crush on, and David entertains himself with his toys and his singing (avoiding the water at all costs), while Robin keeps himself busy with little chores around the cabin and Mercy disappears with her paints and sketchpad. Really, they behave on vacation exactly as they do at home: this is not a family that has mastered spontaneity, or one that fosters interaction with one another.

In short, the Garretts are a normal family, with perfectly normal lives. It takes Anne Tyler to make them real and to not only create them and write about them, but to do it so well that we want to read about the decades of their lives. This may be Tyler’s best novel since Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant!

Wonderful intense family relationships! Great discussion can come from this book. Great book club read. Definitely recommended to all ages and groups!

I love Anne Tyler! She can tell a story! This is a family saga that covers 60 + years. Mercy and Robin, (mom and dad) love each other but as married people sometimes do, they grow apart. This book tells that story as well as the story of the 3 siblings. All of the ups and downs of this family kept me turning the pages.

Families are complicated. And while we all may like to present the Instagram-worthy snapshot of our lives, the truth is that all families have some dysfunction, secrets, and oddities that we may not speak about but we recognize. Anne Tyler has captured that dysfunction in French Braid. This book had me so conflicted. I struggled with understanding the first 30% of the book...just waiting for something to happen. There's no big reveal. No main plot. It's like I was transported to a strange family's living room where I just watched their lives play out before me.

In the end, I liked this book but it took some time for me to get to that opinion.

What I liked:
*The conversations between family members flowed so well. I really was transported into their lives and could hear the banter so easily.
*Once I got to know the characters, I was genuinely interested in them and wanted to find out what happened in their lives.
*This book left me with so much thought and reflection of my own life. Maybe even hit too close to home in some ways. I appreciated that I continued to think about this book long after that last page.

What didn't work for me:
*The book moved slow and it took time to figure out exactly what I was reading as I kept waiting for some big reveal that never happened. But once I understood what to appreciate about the book, it moved much faster.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the advanced digital copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

This book meanders from present time to decades in a Baltimore family saga. Since the plot never really goes anywhere, it never gets there. I was pretty bored.

or most of the book, I thought that French Braid was "ok and rather quirky". And "another overhyped book by marketing". Until the last chapter!! Where it all came together. I was reading the book until I was living the book (or at least remembering that part of my life).

So ... don't miss this one.

Thank you to NetGalley, Anne Tyler (the author) and Knoph Doubleday Publishing for the opportunity to review French Braid in exchange for an honest review.

French Braid by Anne Tyler is an insightful look at families. Tyler brings the perspective that it's okay if family members don't always like each other because they love each other.

Anne Tyler is the master of passive aggression. She writes primarily about quirky families (like mine).
Her characters are always so familiar, yet frustrating, because I recognize myself in them.
I like the way the title, French Braid, is explained - it is like growing up in a family, with kinks and twists in the relationships that even if you leave, they still make an imprint on you, like unbraided hair, it retains it's shape.
She is able to explain away the hurtful or bizarre way people treat their loved ones with her imperfect characters and is also able to show extraordinary love shown by the same characters.
This story takes place within a family over a period of years. It is mostly about a wife who just wants to paint by herself, and how she physically removes herself from her own house & husband, without really admitting to what she is doing. In fact, after a while, her husband is the only one who doesn't realize she doesn't actually live with him anymore - it is quintessential Anne Tyler!

The Garretts take a vacation in the summer of 1959. They are growing apart as a family, even though they rarely leave home. They all have their own goals and dreams. Can they survive as a family as they continue to grow and change over the decades?

Maybe 2 1/2 stars?

Conflicting emotions on this book. While I do appreciate getting a glimpse into the lives of different families, this one was heartbreaking. We start out the story with a family vacation that is dysfunctional at best. Mercy, the mom, has picked up a passion for painting and tends to ignore the rest of her world while enveloped in this hobby. Robin, the father, is determined to make his son, David, be as athletic and socially acceptable as the boy next door. Two daughters, Alice and Lily are polar opposites and we see that as the book unfolds.

Over the next few decades we watch the dysfunction fully unfold and see how each individual in the family adapts or runs from it. We see glimpses of the affects from the way the kids are raised, we see the disconnect in relationships, and breaking away from those norms they were shown. Selfishness, blindness, apathy, survival. Very interesting, but overall I wasn't very connected to the characters, but rather just annoyed (which might have been the point).

Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf Publishing Group for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I have read almost all of Anne Tyler’s books which have a similar theme – a dysfunctional family going about everyday life. This one didn’t grab me as much as others have, although the concept of viewing a family over multiple decades was an interesting one.

Tyler delves into the small details of family relationships, husbands and wives and children and their parents. It was interesting to observe those children growing up to become spouses, parents themselves and then grandparents.

The story unfolds slowly and jumps from one family member to another over decades. The reader rides along with the Garrets’ family as an observer. Tyler’s characters are richly developed but as usual what they are thinking is left for the reader to decide.

I loved so much about this book! The organization was so satisfying - each chapter is told from the perspective of a different member of the family at different times over the past few decades. The last chapter ties back beautifully to the first. I laughed out loud many times - sometimes just because the stories were so funny and sometimes from the sheer joy of recognizing, in the words and actions of the characters, real people I know and love. And when the title was explained in the last chapter - I actually teared up. A beautiful book with a beautiful message - one of Anne Tyler's best.

Another reviewer said about this book, “The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference.” I think they nailed the characters in this book.

The Garrets take their first and last family vacation in the summer of 1959. They rarely leave home, but here they’ve never been further apart. Mercy uses the vacation to pursue her painting passion, ignoring her husband, Robin. Their teenage daughters, staid Alice and boy-crazy Lily, don’t have much in common—in fact, they don’t much like each other. The youngest, David, is already removed from his family’s orbit and lives in his own interior world. And poor Robin loves Mercy with all his heart, but is clueless about what makes her happy.
Did the characters feel realistic? Yes. As a mother, it was painful for me to watch the family through the decades, as each character moved quietly but deliberately apart from the other. Maybe it hit a bit too close to home.

Tyler writes expertly about family relationships, and not all of it was painful. It was sweet to read about David as a grandfather, and remember when he had first been an 8-year-old with his solitary toys, then a college student falling in love, and then also as a parent. When his son Nicholas and young grandson Benny return home during the pandemic, it was delightful to see how Benny was a similar, but better, version of the young David. David is one of the few characters in which I felt growth. Despite the family dysfunction, he finally realizes, “that’s how families work. You think you’re free of them, but you’re never really free. (Just like a French braid) the ripples are crimped in forever.”

French Braid, like Tyler’s many other books, is a family portrait that truthfully shows the relationships, the love and the irritations, the pulling away and the attempts to draw close. Unfortunately, unlike some of her earlier books (Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and The Accidental Tourist come to mind), French Braid is a more quiet story that focuses more on a family drawing apart, and less on the joy of discovering each other.

Insightful is a word used in the synopsis and that is certainly true of the latest novel from Anne Tyler. Her ability to fully flesh out a character and make them totally believable and relatable to the reader is a true gift. Their nuances and quirks are fully realized and while we may not know everything about them, we certainly understand them to some degree. This novel focuses on family and each members relationship to the other. It's complex as is life. It's a beautiful book.

I thought this was a strange book. A family that only takes one vacation for years and years? They also seem to be individuals rather than a family. It is an original story and there are several feel-good moments. Awesome look at life as the baby boomers grew up.

Do you have a sweater in the back of your closet that you've had for a very long time? And when you put it on is just wraps you up in a warm, comfortable, hug? That's how I felt about reading this book!

The book is comprised of eight chapters, the first taking place in 1959, and the last is written in the present day, with the Covid pandemic playing a large part of that story. Each chapter focuses on one family member.

Talk about dysfunctional! they aren't boring and it wasn't a boring read!

I love Anne Tyler. Absolutely love her. And, to be clear, I loved her BEFORE I moved to the Baltimore area over 20 years ago. I love the slow unspooling of her stories, the character development, the small insights of what makes people and families what they are.

I say all that because, while I have the utmost respect for Anne Tyler and her writing (and PLEASE continue to write! BTW- an article about her is in People magazine over the past month) this book was more of a miss for me, personally. I really had trouble caring about the characters and there were some VAST jumps in time that left me feeling a bit bereft and disconnected.

For me, a 3 rounded up to 3.5.

But again, LOVE Anne Tyler and her work. She is a national treasure (and a Baltimore treasure too!)

Thank you to Netgalley and the Publisher for a galley preview edition of this book in exchange for an honest review.