Valérie Perrin was an author I knew I had to read for my 2025 FOMO Challenge (and she was an “audience pick” too). While this is not her best known work, this was the book I actually had at home.
You can hear me and my friend discussing this book in podcast form here, in Portuguese:
This book has very high ratings and raving reviews, and usually that is enough to make me wary - moreover, my mother likes Valérie Perrin’s books and our taste in books does not tend to match.
To sum up, the titular three are three childhood friends - Adrien, Étienne and Nina. They meet in 1986 when they are 10; we are now in 2017 and they have not been friends since the mid 90s, so their friendship is not as long as it would seem. From the beginning, we know there was drama - and when a car is found at the bottom of a lake in the (way too) small province La Comelle with a body inside, we as readers are told that here lies the secret that broke their friendship.
Well… let’s just say that early on I knew that whatever twists and revelations were to come would leave me disappointed. I think the low expectations I set for this book somewhat helped reading through it - my French pocket book edition is 760 pages long -, and I must give kudos to the author that she managed to make such a long, uninteresting book so compelling to read. But even though the writing is gripping enough, I felt nothing for these characters.
That being said, at least 300 of those pages could have been cut - the book has several subplots, accessory characters and details that add nothing and feel like too much going on (I’d cut 100% of the Louise parts, for example). Out of the three titular characters, only Nina feels fleshed out and has an interesting enough story. The other two have little to no personality traits and feel like cardboard cutouts.
Had the book been much shorter and more focused, I believe it would have overall worked much better; the ending where every character seems to find some closure after reigniting their supposedly incredible friendship 20 years on felt very forced where I believe it was supposed to be moving.
This is yet another book I read this year that follows two chronologies: one in the present, and the other in the past moving forward to meet the present days. This could have worked better, had the book been less repetitive - the present slogged, and several events in the past were revisited and shown 2-3 times from different perspectives, adding not much to the original view. It gets more disorienting than layered.
Maybe a bit of a spoiler alert here - having a character be trans, and having that be a revelation/plot twist without adding any complexity to this character is in bad taste and reductive at best.
Did this just book lack a critical editor? It is highly readable and I think it could have been much better if several parts and subplots had been left out.