Anne Tyler has done it again. Her books can appear to be simple tellings of domestic lives. But don’t you be fooled, Tyler’s characters, particularly her female protagonists, are anything but simple, or shallow. They are often ‘of a certain age’, in this case Gail Baines is sixty-one. She has walked away from her job after being sidelined for a promotion; her daughter is about to get married and her ex-husband unexpectedly arrives on her doorstep, with a foster cat in tow, looking to stay.

What I love about Tyler’s women is that they are a little ‘sharp’, or ‘spiky’. They are strong and have strong opinions. They make mistakes. They look back on their mistakes and own them. They are sometimes judgemental, but they are their own harshest critics. I find them incredibly relatable. The honesty of her characters can hurt. As Gail considers her failed marriage she notes that ‘when the anger fades, the sadness comes right back again the same as ever’.

Tyler doesn’t waste words: this is a novella and the perfect length for her narrative. I listened to the audio and it was a mere four and a half hours.
Highly recommended.

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.

A perfect book to listen to - I found myself immersed in the lives of the Whitshank family, through several generations. Like most families, ’they imagined they were special’. Tyler has an eye for the minutiae of family life and relationships: the good and the bad. All the shades of grey are revealed; everyone’s foibles. But Tyler does it all with such a gentle touch, and always with such honesty.

Who can’t relate to Abby bemoaning that ’the trouble with dying … is that you don’t get to see how everything turns out. You won’t know the ending.’ And her daughter’s reply, ‘But mum, there is no ending.’ To which Abby replies, ‘Well, I know that.’ And then the unspoken kicker: ‘In theory.’ Thank you Anne Tyler!

When I reached the end of the book, I felt I was leaving close friends.

Oh, Anne Tyler, you’ve done it again! In only 178 pages you have crafted a deceivingly simple story about a seemingly simple man that reveals how even the simplest of souls is only looking for love and understanding.
Micah Mortimer in a man in his early forties whose life is all about order. He lives alone, he has his routines, he has a large extended chaotic family whom he likes a lot, but they make him crazy sometimes. He’s been in a relationship with Cass for over three years ‘and they had reached the stage where things had more or less solidified: compromises arrived at, incompatibilities adjusted to, minor quirks overlooked. They had it down to a system, you could say’. In Micah’s eyes, ‘his life was good. He had no reason to feel unhappy’.
Micah struggles to find the appropriate thing to say, so often he says nothing.

‘Sometimes when he was dealing with people, he felt like he was operating one of those claw machines on a boardwalk, those shovel things where you tried to scoop up a prize but the controls were too unwieldy and you worked at too great a remove.’