![]() ![]() There’s the joys of little children and the visceral sense of loss as they turn into sometimes disappointing adults balanced by the comforts of grand-parenting. Listeners will identify with many themes, marriages and situations: Mercy breaks away from her husband when the children have left home, not because she can’t stand him, but because she wants to paint in a studio of her own and be HER. A natural death (I won’t spoil it, there are bound to be many but you’ll know which one) is truly shocking. ![]() Tyler’s skill is in making ordinary lives totally involving and so startlingly real in all their complexities that they live on beyond the page. Thus 7 year-old David, a quirky solitary little boy on the family lake-side holiday at the beginning, ricochets through life and at the end is a fond grandfather, never having recovered from his father’s harsh misjudged attempt to make him swim on that childhood trip. Anne Tyler born in 1941 is especially qualified to write this poignant chart of the Garett family through six decades from 1959 right up to the Pandemic, revealing how the sprawling legacy of members’ traits and actions ripple through the generations, braided together as in a French braid. Sixty years of a family plaited together I loved this and found it profoundly moving. ![]()
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