SRP Book Review #3

Three Junes by Julia Glass

353 pages

Three Junes tells the story of members and acquaintances of a Scotch (Or is it Scottish for people, Scotch for things? Anyway, they're from Scotland.) family by giving us snippets from their lives in June of 1989, 1996, and 1999. The time structure of the book is its gimmick, and because of this gimmick, we should only be getting small glimpses into the characters' lives. However, Glass has done an incredible job drawing vivid, complex, interesting characters and I felt like I had actually been taken through 10 years of their lives. It helps that each section is narrated by a different person, so, for example, in the first section we get a description of a character through his father, the next is narrated by him, and in the last we get the viewpoint of someone who has just met him. The plot is a little hard to describe. My first impulse is to say that nothing much happens, it's mostly character sketches, but then I realize that it's more that so many things happen, just as you would expect in a book that spans 10 years in the lives of at least 10 major characters.

For some reason, I was expecting a much lighter read, and I'm not quite sure why. (Maybe, because of the title, I was thinking it would be more of a summer read. And yes, I did read it in June on purpose. I am nerdy that way.) This book is really more of a "literary" book. I think it took me quite a bit longer than it would normally take me to read a book of this length because I got caught up in the language. I don't want to say that it's dense writing, because that would give entirely the wrong impression, but that was the first word that sprang to mind.