Book Review: Three Junes

Title: Three Junes
Author: Julia Glass

    Review: One of the best books I have ever read. It's difficult for me to say that after having taken so long to get into it, but it turned out to be so much more than I'd have imagined. It's a Damn book--the kind that, when I've finished it, I turn the last page, sit back and say, aloud, "Damn." And I sit there for a few minutes and ruminate on how different I am from when I began reading this book.
    Three Junes is a triptych of sorts, a novel in three overlapping parts. Yet it's also a very cleverly designed study of two characters whose lives don't intersect throughout the book. Much of my frustration with the early section of the book was that it didn't seem to be going anywhere. That would have been alleviated (or eliminated completely) had I been more aware of what was coming. (I generally avoid specific reviews of something like this because I don't want my own appreciation of it skewed by a reviewer's opinion.)
     Once into the second June, then, I was engrossed in the story of Fenno McLeod, a Scot living in New York but frequently traveling to his home country. And by the time I reached the third June, it was all I could do to put the book down and do ordinary things like sleep and eat. How can I not be moved by lines like this one: "'Never talk yourself out of knowing you're in love,' he says, 'or into thinking that you are.'"? Or a character who thinks this way, when asked by his young [French] niece if he is feeling sad: "I put an arm around her. 'No, sweetheart, not sad. Not exactly. But...mon coeur est fatigué.' It is the simplest explanation I can find; how could I tell her that my heart is in fact imploding?"
     There is much about this novel that I adored and that I wish to immediately fall back into and read again, now that I know more. And there are some things about it that I might have done differently, had I done them myself, but I do not mean to imply that I didn't love it. This is a 10, a book that I will read again--and recommend to anyone who's not afraid of thinking.