Author: Anne Tyler
Genre: Women’s Fiction
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication Date: March 22, 2022
Book Description: NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • From the beloved Pulitzer Prize–winning author—a funny, joyful, brilliantly perceptive journey deep into one Baltimore family’s foibles, from a boyfriend with a red Chevy in the 1950s up to a longed-for reunion with a grandchild in our pandemic present.
The Garretts take their first and last family vacation in the summer of 1959. They hardly ever leave home, but in some ways they have never been farther apart. Mercy has trouble resisting the siren call of her aspirations to be a painter, which means less time keeping house for her husband, Robin. Their teenage daughters, steady Alice and boy-crazy Lily, could not have less in common. Their youngest, David, is already intent on escaping his family’s orbit, for reasons none of them understand. Yet, as these lives advance across decades, the Garretts’ influences on one another ripple ineffably but unmistakably through each generation.
Full of heartbreak and hilarity, French Braid is classic Anne Tyler: a stirring, uncannily insightful novel of tremendous warmth and humor that illuminates the kindnesses and cruelties of our daily lives, the impossibility of breaking free from those who love us, and how close—yet how unknowable—every family is to itself.
Rating: 4 Stars
Review: You can hand me any book that Anne Tyler wrote and I am 100% in. This is the story of one family spanning almost 70 years in Baltimore, and is so simple but offers a glimpse of the inner workings of one of the imperfect groups of people, you may ever read about.
We meet Mercy and Robin raising their children on a family vacation. There are first loves, heartbreaks, and of course sunburns. Over the next chapters we watch this family get older, and eventually Mercy and Robin are empty nesters and move into an unconventional marriage.
Their children get married, have kids, and all go through their own struggles, and it is as simple as that. There is not a lot to this story, but it does not make it any less wonderful. Tyler writes with so much charm and detail, that you feel you really know this family.
This is a book that leaves you happy, I was completely satisfied and sometimes that is exactly what you need in your life.
Thank you NetGalley and Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group for an Advanced Reader’s Copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Obsessed Bookaholic 