Review: French Braid

I always finish an Anne Tyler book with a pervading sense of melancholy. Her stories follow multi-generations in a family, and illustrate that life is fleeting. Memory plays an important role in Tyler’s books and characters recall their pasts ’like someone wandering through an old house’.

I read [b:A Spool of Blue Thread|22501028|A Spool of Blue Thread|Anne Tyler|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1451435883l/22501028.SX50.jpg|41711673] recently, and it’s hard to avoid the similarities between the two books. But this is what Tyler does: interrogates the domestic life. As one character asks, “Oh, what makes a family not work?"

I found some of the characters, particularly Mercy, hard to love in French Braid. At first I was cheering her on, as she makes her own life away from her role as wife and mother. But I found her too selfish and quite cruel in how she goes about gaining her independence.

Although not a favourite Anne Tyler novel, French Braid shows that Tyler still knows how to gently reveal what makes a family, a family.

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