Title: THREE
Author: Valerie Perrin
Read: April 2024
My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 all the stars!
Book Description:
From the international bestselling
author of Fresh Water for Flowers, a beautifully told and suspenseful story
about the ties that bind us and the choices that make us who we are.
1986: Adrien, Etienne and Nina are 10 years old when they meet at school and
quickly become inseparable. They promise each other they will one day leave
their provincial backwater, move to Paris, and never part.
2017: A car is pulled up from the bottom of the lake, a body inside. Virginie,
a local journalist with an enigmatic past reports on the case while also
reflecting on the relationship between the three friends, who were unusually
close when younger but now no longer speak. . As Virginie moves closer to the
surprising truth, relationships fray and others are formed.
Valérie Perrin has an unerring gift for delving into life. In Three, she brings
readers along with her through a sequence of heart-wrenching events and
revelations that span three decades. Three tells a moving story of love and
loss, hope and grief, friendship and adversity, and of time as an ineluctable
agent of change.
My musings:
Oh, my broken heart! What a wonderful story about love,
friendship, grief and identity that touched my heart as deeply as FRESH WATER
FOR FLOWERS (my first book by the author which had me coming back for more).
THREE is the story of three
childhood friends who meet at school when they are ten years old and become
inseparable. Do you recall those innocent days of childhood friendship, when
your friends meant the world to you and became almost an extension of yourself,
with the boundaries blurring between their thoughts and desires and your own?
Nina, Etienne and Adrien are closer than siblings, sharing their thoughts, their
dreams and their plans for the future, supporting each other through tough
times. It is unimaginable to them that they would not continue to share their
lives after school finishes. Their plan is to move to Paris, rent an apartment
together and make music. But as it so often happens, life has other plans for
them.
Now, thirty years later, the friends
meet up again for the first time, reflecting on the past three decades of life,
love, loss and shattered dreams – and trying to reconnect to the bond they
shared as children.
THREE is a book that speaks to the
heart, in every way. I loved reflecting on the meaning of friendship – how as
children we are attracted to people in their purest form, without all the
distractions we encounter later in life. Haven’t we all experienced this
ourselves: we may not see some friends for decades and yet it seems as if we
have only spoken yesterday. And yet, with others, we lose touch, grow apart,
never find anything in common again, wondering what we ever saw in each other in
the first place. As Nina, Etienne and Adrien fight their own battles thrown at
them by life, we get to see them develop personalities quite unlike the
innocent children who first forged a bond at school.
I loved every minute of this book,
truly grieving the loss of these characters once I finished. Books like this
don’t come around often, and yet Perrin has given me two memorable reads I will
treasure and revisit when I want food for the soul and heart.
