‘Three’ by Valérie Perrin (translated by Hildegarde Serle)

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

“A good long book is like a biscuit. It has lots of nooks and crannies to let the butter in.” (s.penkevich, From a review on Goodreads)

1986: Adrien, Étienne, and Nina are ten years old when they meet at school. They quickly become inseparable, promising each other they will leave their provincial backwater one day, move to Paris, and never part.

2017: A car is dredged up from the bottom of the lake, a body inside. Virginie, a local journalist with an enigmatic past, follows the case while also reflecting on the relationship between the three former friends, who no longer speak to each other. As Virginie reveals more about herself and about the three friends, she also moves closer to the surprising truth.

Just like Fresh Water for Flowers, this novel (translated from the French), is a slow burn mystery, beautifully written, with a satisfying ending, but not everyone will have the patience to stick with it (at over 500 pages). The book has one major plot twist three quarters of the way in that blew me away and was so perfect I really want to tell you about it, but of course I can’t. I am committed to no spoilers, so the following comments will also be mysterious–sorry about that. But this twist made the novel even more beautiful for me. What she describes and explores here is hugely important and handled super sensitively.

There’s a lot to enjoy in this novel, if you don’t mind sinking into a mysterious brick of a novel that is elegant, but slow and mostly character driven. It’s a commitment. I wish it was shorter and a bit more brisk, not for my sake (because I don’t mind a long slow novel), but so that it would be more approachable for more readers. I was going to give it a solid three stars (which is a good rating) but the major twist bumped it up to four stars for me. If you loved Fresh Water for Flowers, it’s really worth a try.