i really really liked this, especially for the first half or so. it's definitely not for everyone, as those 300 or so pages, that i liked so much, didn't really have much happen at all. it was just language and friendship and character development. plus a wee bit of obfuscation that made me wonder where things were going, and why i was confused. i loved that.

i am not sure i loved the clarification of that confusion, but i think it was well done. it was less deeply explored, which i thought was unfortunate, and the very end seemed a bit of a cheat. but i still really liked this. the writing was enough for me. i don't think i've read a book this long mostly just for the language in a while, and i so enjoyed it. i'd definitely read her again. ( )

1986: Adrien, Etienne og Nina er kun ti år gamle første gang de mødes, og de bliver hurtigt nære venner. De lover hverandre at de en dag skal forlade byen de bor i, flytte sammen til Paris og aldrig miste kontakten med hverandre. 2017: Et bilvrag trækkes op af en sø, med en død person indeni. En lokal journalist begynder å grave i sagen. Langsomt, men sikkert afdækker hun det usædvanlig stærke bånd mellem de tre venner. Hvordan er deres fortid knyttet til personen i bilen? Og hvorfor har de ikke længere nogen kontakt? Fra forfatteren af den internationale bestsælger "Vand til blomster".

“They were three, or nothing.”

On the third of September, 1986, Nina Beau, Étienne Beaulieu and Adrien Bobin are placed together in the same fifth grade class of École Pasteur in La Comelle, Burgundy. Nina, abandoned by her mother as a baby, father unknown is being raised by her loving grandfather, a postal worker. Étienne belongs to an affluent family and lives with his parents, younger sister Louise and has an elder brother who is away pursuing higher studies. Adrien is being raised by his mother who was once the mistress of Adrien’s father who is a fleeting presence in Adrien’s life, paying support to Josephine and meeting Adrien infrequently.

“Étienne was the leader, Nina the heart, and Adrien followed with never a complaint.”

What follows is a wonderful childhood- inseparable friends sharing their joys, their sorrows, their families and their respective dreams - dreams beyond La Comelle - making plans and promises of a future spent supporting one another as they pursued their dreams.

“Adrien secretly dreams of recognition, he wants his compositions to be lauded to shut his father up, and never have to smell his chlorophyll breath ever again. Étienne dreams of what accompanies fame: the gilded existence, the easy life. Nina hopes to sing, draw, and fall passionately in love.”

But when Nina’s grandfather meets with a fatal accident in 1994 weeks before Nina is to leave for Paris with her friends, life changes for all three of them. Three friends embrace their new realities and their lives take them in different directions and away from one another. Nina stays back to marry her obsessive suitor which leads to an unhappy marriage. Adrian and Étienne leave and eventually, Adrien finds fame as a writer and Étienne becomes a police officer.

On the very same day, 17 August 1994, eighteen-year-old Clotilde Marais, known to all three of them, disappears without a trace. On 5 December 2017, a car reported stolen in 1994 is found after having been submerged in “Lac de la Forêt”. Human remains are found in the car and after years of being apart, the three of them are drawn together once again by “the secret that only the three think they know” and much more. After years of avoiding one another, the three are forced to confront their secrets, lies and betrayals and accept who they have become and reveal the same to one another.

"We think we know everything about our friends, when really we know nothing.”

It is rare to finish a 550 page book and come out saying that you wish it hadn’t ended. That is how I feel about Valérie Perrin’s Three (brilliantly translated by Hildegarde Serle). From the moment I met these three characters, I felt invested in their stories- both as individuals and as friends. As we follow Nina, Étienne and Adrien from their childhood through their adolescence and adulthood we bear witness to their struggles, their resilience and their friendship. They triumph, they stumble, they hurt one another, they are hurt by one another and others, they make mistakes, they are weak, they are strong - in other words, they are real and relatable, simple in what they want from life yet complex in their emotions and their relationships with one other, with others in their lives and in how they perceive themselves.

While we not may always agree with what they say or do, these are characters that we want to stay with and be a part of their stories. The mystery surrounding Clotilde Marais’s disappearance and the discovery of the car found submerged in the lake is intriguing and serves as the bridge between the past and present. Virginie’s first-person narrative, which is interspersed throughout the main narrative, also lends a sense of mystery around her relationship with the 'Three', and her intimate knowledge of the three friends and their lives also keeps you guessing as to who she might be.

“My name is Virginie. I’m the same age as them. Today, out of the three, only Adrien still speaks to me. Nina despises me. As for Étienne, it’s me who can longer stand him. And yet, they’ve fascinated me since childhood. I’ve only ever become attached to those three. And to Louise.”

The author does an excellent job of transitioning between past and present-day events and never for a moment does the reader lose interest. The author touches upon many important and relevant themes in this novel such as abandonment, jealousy, obsession, sexual identity,spousal abuse, and grief- and does so with great emotional depth and the utmost sensitivity. I loved how the love for and protection of animals was woven into the narrative. The writing is exquisite, the narrative is engaging and flows seamlessly across different timelines and the characterizations are superb. The author does justice to not only the main characters in the novel but also every one of the supporting characters in their lives, Louise , in particular.

Having loved Valérie Perrin’s Fresh Water for Flowers, I could not wait to pick up this novel and I was not disappointed. I cannot thank Kristi Bontrager at Europa Editions enough for the digital review copy of this beautifully written, compelling and immersive novel.

“Imagine you’ve been unable to move for years because your fist is clenched inside a container, and to manage to pull your hand out, to free yourself, you just need to let go of what you’re clutching in your clenched fist…..You open up your hand, you lose what’s inside it, it falls to the bottom of the container, but you are free.” ( )

Nina, Etienne, and Adrien meet on the first day of school when they are 10. From that day forward, they are inseparable, and plan to go to Paris together when they receive their bac degrees....But circumstances intervene, and in the "present" of this book, 2017, the three are estranged and have not spoken in years.

The book skips around in time and varies the pov character, as we learn the story of their intense friendship and what torpedoed it. I found this an engaging tale of growing up, young adulthood, and even early middle-age. It has an intricate plot, an appealing setting (small French country town and Paris), and is a well-written page-turner.

Recommended. 3 1/2 stars

First line: "This morning Nina looked at me without seeing me."

Pertinent quote: "In every life there are some befores and afters" ( )

Half way thru this novel I gave up. Just too boring. ( )

Friendships are special things and children are the best at them. They can be so open and welcoming to other children. My own children would come off of playgrounds to inform me that their new friend so and so had told them something or to ask if the new friend could come over the play. Every time they used this language: "my new friend." And while many of these were momentary friendships, not lasting any longer than the time we spent on the playground, they also developed deep and abiding friendships that persist to this day. These dear childhood friendships can be battered and they will survive but they can also be broken given enough stress on them. Valerie Perrin's latest novel, Three, centers on three friends who were inseparable as children but who have gone their own ways as adults because of tragedies and life choices.

Adrien, Étienne, and Nina are only 10 years old when they meet in 1986 in their provincial French town. Nina is graceful, sensitive, and artistic, being raised by her postman grandfather since her mother left when she was small. She is the glue between the two boys. Étienne is good looking and popular, from a wealthy family, but he can never satisfy his judgmental father. Adrien is quiet and wickedly smart; he and his single mother are new to the area. Somehow these very different fifth graders come together to become "the three." The three who are always there for each other. The three who will protect each other. The three who are as much a part of each other as a limb is. Until they are not. Until they are each just one.

In 2017, in their adult lives, Adrien, Étienne, and Nina are estranged. They do not speak to each other. Their once firm plans to escape their town and move to Paris to start a band are long since abandoned. They are very different people than the children and young adults they once were, changed by tragedy and circumstance. Local journalist Virginie, who once knew "the three," watches the fallout as a car pulled from a local lake with a body inside brings back the summer that everything started going so very wrong for each of the friends. Whose body is it? Could it be Étienne's missing girlfriend? And if it is, what will each of "the three" make of it?

Perrin has written an intricately plotted novel that is epic in scope. Her characters are complex and well rounded. Both timelines are told in the present tense but only the portions that the mysterious Virginie narrates are from the first person perspective. This gives a slightly larger distance from the story of "the three" than from Virginie's watchful tale, keeping the fabled friendship just that much more out of arm's reach, that much more enigmatic. The two storylines twine around each other, leading the reader to the things that ultimately ruptured the friendship, to the revelation of the body's identity, to just who Virginie is and who she is specifically to "the three," and to the future that each of them face and embrace in the end. There are well crafted, slow measured reveals of the secrets hidden for years that build the story to its end as Perrin poses the question of whether you can ever really fully know another person, or perhaps even yourself. This is a literary mystery within a well written story of friendship, loyalty, betrayal, the past and the present. It is a quiet, long, slow novel, thoroughly engrossing and occasionally surprising. Fans of literary fiction will enjoy it for sure. ( )

'They walk side by side, in a hurry... Nina in the middle, Adrien on her right, Étienne on her left.'

Valerie Perrin's 'Fresh Water For Flowers' was one of the most profoundly moving books I have read for years, so my expectations for this new novel, with the same translator in Hildegarde Serle, were high - which made me a little nervous, truth be told. How could Perrin possibly keep me so absorbed in a new 500-page novel? Answer: by writing with such compassion and wonder that you just lose yourself in the world she creates.

This is a story of friendship, of three lives which intertwine across the years in a small town in France. Three lives which are touched by tragedy and loss which strains their friendship to the utmost.

The dual timeframe of the novel means that the story, and the backstory, slowly reveals itself. There is a massive twist that, me being the dunce that I am, I simply didn't see. Thinking back I guess the clues were there, but it was for me one of those genuinely 'what the...!!' moments. One of Perrin's greatest qualities is her ability to create complex and involving characters. I genuinely believed in the lives of Nina, Adrien and Étienne, as well as our narrator Virginie. Each of them, in their own way, has a need to heal, and only when the three childhood friends are reunited for one last journey together is there any possibility for that to happen. Perhaps the ending is a little too neat, but that's a minor point. I was so invested in the characters that I felt loathe to close the book on finishing. I simply didn't want it to end.

Please don't be put off by the 500 pages. This is a wonderful, compelling and humane exploration of what it means to be a friend, and what it means to find the real you.

I nagged everyone to read 'Fresh Water For Flowers', and now I'm afraid I'll be doing the same for 'Three.' Without doubt this will be one of my books of the year. Just glorious. ( )

I read Fresh Water for Flowers and it was one of my favourite books of 2020 (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2020/11/review-of-fresh-water-for-flowers-by.html), so I was excited to read Three by the same author. Like the former, the latter is totally immersive.

Adrien, Étienne, and Nina are ten years old when they meet at school in 1986 in the small town of La Comelle in Burgundy. They immediately become inseparable. Their friendship, they believe, will last forever; when they graduate, they plan to move to Paris and live together while they pursue their dreams. Three decades later, Virginie, a journalist, reports on the discovery of a car from the bottom of a lake in La Comelle; there’s a body inside. While reporting on the case, she reflects on the friendship of the trio who no longer speak to each other. Gradually, secrets, lies, and betrayals are revealed, explaining what happened to that friendship.

From the beginning, there are questions for which the reader wants answers. Who exactly is the enigmatic Virginie? What was her relationship with the three friends that gives her such intimate knowledge of their lives? Why does only Adrien speak to her now? Whose body is in the recovered car? Could it be Clotilde, Étienne’s girlfriend in 1994? What caused the rift which resulted in the three inseparable friends no longer speaking to each other? Before all these queries are answered, more questions arise. Only at the end is all revealed, though the fate of everyone is not completely known.

There are certainly some unexpected twists. One particular revelation had me going back to the beginning to re-read sections. That re-reading left me impressed with the number of clues the author sprinkled along the way. Saying any more would reveal too much.

Characterization is outstanding. All the characters are complex. All have positive and negative traits. The reader sees them not only in relationship to the group but also as individuals. We come to see their personal struggles and desires. Though I found myself not always agreeing with their decisions, I understood why they made their choices. Adrien, for instance, harbours a deep secret; he is quiet and wary and distrustful of others; he describes having a wall which doesn’t just separate him from others but “separating him from himself, the one he’s been hiding behind ever since he could breathe.” Nina was abandoned by her mother and later suffers a tragedy; these shape her decision-making and even explain her dedication to finding homes for abandoned animals.

The book emphasizes how it is not possible to fully know someone. Even the three close friends come to see that they did not know everything about their closest companions. Some events are revisited and the perspective of another character given. These are not needless repetitions because they serve to show that even shared experiences do not result in identical memories. The impact of a shared experience is not the same for everyone.

The novel moves back and forth through time over 30 years, and sometimes the shifts in time can be momentarily disorienting and confusing. The viewpoints of other secondary characters (Clotilde, Nina’s grandfather, Bernard Roi, Gé and Emmanuel Damamme, etc.) are also occasionally included. Nothing that is included, however, is extraneous; everything contributes to the development of plot, character, or theme. In the end, I was amazed at the intricacy employed to present a cohesive whole.

At over 600 pages, this novel asks the reader to invest considerable time. It is, however, a rewarding experience. Personally, I think it’s a book to which I will return in the certainty that I’ll be further impressed with its complexity.

Note: I received a digital galley from the publisher via NetGalley.

Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski). ( )

I was torn on the rating I wanted to give this novel, Three by Valerie Perrin, but the characters and the story (stories) have stayed present to me for these few days which bumped it up.

The main group of three friends and then the fourth who is periphery at best to the group encompass the best and the worst of friendships and cliques both growing up and as adults. These are flawed, and at times frustrating, characters. Which is to say a lot like people we all know (and ourselves if we're honest). If you like getting to know characters, especially a group along with their interactions, you will love this book for that alone.

The mystery at the heart of the novel serves as much as a frame so we can jump between their school years and their present. What made these shifts in time particularly compelling was the way most of the jumps informed the sections around them. Knowing in going back the things they didn't yet know, and in coming back to the present knowing what they had thought and expected their futures to hold. If you're a reader who both inhabits the novel and relates it to your own life, this might be similar to when you pull out an old yearbook and get lost in the memories only to remember what actually has transpired since then.

I probably became almost immediately invested in them early because I met one of my very best friends in school simply because we were in the same class and ended up seated by each other. Until I moved, we were inseparable, so the idea of serendipity determining one's best friend hit me close to home. I even called him to see how he and his family are doing (they're doing great, by the way!).

I would recommend this to readers who enjoy taking time to get to know characters and who understand that just as in life, characters are neither all good nor all bad, yet we love them anyway.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. ( )