Three Junes

A Novel

By: Julia Glass

Narrated by: John Keating

Length: 13 hrs and 59 mins

Publisher's summary

Three Junes is a vividly textured symphonic novel set on both sides of the Atlantic during three fateful summers in the lives of a Scottish family.

In June of 1989, Paul McLeod, the recently widowed patriarch, becomes infatuated with a young American artist while traveling through Greece and is compelled to relive the secret sorrows of his marriage. Six years later, Paul’s death reunites his sons at Tealing, their idyllic childhood home, where Fenno, the eldest, faces a choice that puts him at the center of his family’s future.

A lovable, slightly repressed gay man, Fenno leads the life of an aloof expatriate in the West Village, running a shop filled with books and birdwatching gear. He believes himself safe from all emotional entanglements - until a worldly neighbor presents him with an extraordinary gift and a seductive photographer makes him an unwitting subject. Each man draws Fenno into territories of the heart he has never braved before, leading him toward an almost unbearable loss that will reveal to him the nature of love.

Love in its limitless forms - between husband and wife, between lovers, between people and animals, between parents and children - is the force that moves these characters’ lives, which collide again, in yet another June, over a Long Island dinner table. This time it is Fenno who meets and captivates Fern, the same woman who captivated his father in Greece ten years before. Now pregnant with a son of her own, Fern, like Fenno and Paul before him, must make peace with her past to embrace her future.

Elegantly detailed yet full of emotional suspense, often as comic as it is sad, Three Junes is a glorious triptych about how we learn to live, and live fully, beyond incurable grief and betrayals of the heart - how family ties, both those we’re born into and those we make, can offer us redemption and joy.

©2002 by Julia Glass
(P)2002 by Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"Julia Glass' talent just sends chills up my spine; her novel is a marvel." (Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls)
"Has the rich pleasures of a 19th-century novel and the rush of New York life of the last ten years. I'm amazed it's a first novel - it is a mature, captivating work of fiction." (John Casey, author of The Half-life of Happiness)
"Almost threatens to burst with all the life it contains...extraordinary." (Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours)

Don't know if story was good or not.

This book may be brilliant but i will never know as I had a very difficult time understanding the narrator. It was way too much work to decipher his words to make this an enjoyable listening experience so I gave up after 25 minutes.

Boring Boring Boring

I have tried for over a week to get into this book. I have relistened to it over and over, but just do NOT CARE for any of the characters............. and please get rid of the narrator, it is impossible to listen to.......

Disappointed

What would have made Three Junes better?

Perhaps not the best material for an audio book. The story/timeline skips around without notice. First 2 parts were interesting but part 3 bogs down in too many characters.

What was most disappointing about Julia Glass’s story?

The last part. I rarely abandon a book after listening to this much of it but this one "did me in"!

What does John Keating bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

His accent.

If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from Three Junes?

Re-write the last part "The Boys".

Worse fake Scots accent ever!

In the midst of this book now, and it is ruined by Keating's very poor and uncertain fake Scots accent. He sounds confused -- sometimes Irish, sometimes fake Scots, maybe a bit of Welsh in there, but not authentic. Better off to use his own voice -- whatever it is. Would not recommend based on fakey narration. Why not just hire a Scotsman to read it, for pete's sake?

Boring, difficult to follow

Perhaps this book is better in print. While I enjoyed the narrator’s accents, I couldn’t understand much of it. And the chapters were very unclear as to when , where, and who was speaking. Beyond those issues, I found the content slow, disjointed, and boring. I tried to finish listening to it, but it wasn’t worth my time. I would not recommend this title to others.

three junes

I felt the format was pretentious, and although I forced myself to invest several hours in this award winning lightweight I could not continue. The characters meant nothing to me. I rest my case.

Shallow, inconsequential, tedious

If you enjoy soap operas and fiction in women's pulp magazines you may like this, otherwise save your time. The writing is quite passable, in a creative writing course kind of way, but the characters and everything they do and feel are so shallow and inconsequential that boredom will set in very quickly. I struggled through nearly three chapters but it didn't get any better so I gave up. It was impossible to care about anyone in the book, any more than they seem to really care about anything in their lives. The dialog is wooden and predictable - the only entertainment I got from the book was in guessing what the next statement was going to be, and I was right most of the time.

Amazed

I am amazed at the number of good reviews. I made it about half way through the first half, and never even bothered to download the last half. I would listen to all of it if I were stranded on an island with nothing else to do. The form won't let me give it no stars.

Disappointing

Although the author "writes" well, this was the most disappointing book that I have read in a long time. I found it very confusing going back and forth between present and past. You only received glimpses of things, but the author never tied it all together.

Additionally, the reader does not become invested in the characters, except perhaps in Fenno somewhat and that only because he is present throughout the book. The book feels like three short stories (and Fenno just happens to be in each one). The last section - about Fern -- was totally useless and served no purpose other than to take up space.

I read the book to the very end hoping that it would all somehow come together. WRONG! There were too many unanswered questions and unresolved issues. I WOULD NOT RECOMMEND THIS BOOK.

Difficult to follow

I think it would've helped if the book had been written with someone narrating it in mind in order to break up the time periods. This would have helped the listener immensely know where they were in the story.