French braids … that’s how families work …You think you’re free of them, but you’re never really free; the ripples are crimped in forever.’
This is classic Anne Tyler, tenderly and lovingly exploring families and their complex, yet ordinary, everyday relationships.
Tyler captures many milestones and events in the Garrett family life as they grow and flounder throughout five decades. There is marriage, raising children, years of teenage angst, growing old and the empty nest syndrome. In particular, she writes about the ripple effect of one event, one summer, on the Garrett family’s first and only holiday and how that event rebounded years later.
Tyler’s heroes and heroines are cleverly drawn and identifiable. There is Robin, the workaholic father who never quite feels comfortable in his own skin; his wife, Mercy, a woman who devotes herself to raising her children but who is an artist at her very core. And their children: Alice, the sensible, practical daughter, the organiser and cook; Lily, wild and abandoned; and David, the much younger sibling who doesn’t share his father’s interests.
I enjoyed this book enormously and highly recommend it.The story unfolds so seamlessly that before you realise it, you are deeply drawn into the rich tapestry of the Garrett family’s life, with all its joy and tragedies. Like all of Tyler’s books, French Braid leaves you hungering for more.
Reviewed by Karen Williams
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. She is the author of more than twenty novels. Her twentieth novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2015. Her eleventh novel, Breathing Lessons, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1989. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
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