Review by Booklist Review
Nina, Adrien, and Étienne meet as 10-year-olds in the French village of La Comelle, and remain inseparable throughout their teen years. Their plans to move to Paris to begin their adult lives are derailed by a series of tragic and unexpected incidents that begin to tear the trio apart. Decades later, in 2017, a car is dredged up from the bottom of the village's lake, and Virginie, a mysterious woman with a connection to the now-estranged trio, arrives in La Comelle. What follows is a process of reckoning and reconciliation that will transform their lives. Perrin (Fresh Water for Flowers, 2020) uses alternating chapters to reveal the characters in their youth as well as the present day, heightening the suspense surrounding both the wreckage in the lake and Virginie's identity. There's a lot to follow--almost too much--but patient readers will be rewarded with a clever resolution that provides each of the characters with the forgiveness and redemption they need to move forward with their lives. Suggest this to fans of reflective psychological fiction.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Friendship is complicated in Perrin's (Fresh Water for Flowers) enticing exploration of a trio who meet on the first day of fifth grade and remain inseparable. Adrien Bobin, Etienne Beaulieu, and Nina Beau grow up in 1980s Le Comelle, France, where they become obsessed with movies and music, fantasize about leaving home, and are bound by two tragic events. As teens, they're certain their new wave band will give them artistic, intellectual, and personal freedom, but heartbreak strikes when Nina's mail carrier grandfather, beloved by the friends, is struck and killed by a van. In 2017, a body discovered submerged in a car in a nearby sand quarry may be that of a schoolmate, Clothilde Marais, who went missing at 18. Perrin wily withholds facts about the deaths through much of the novel, along with the secret identity of a freelance journalist narrator, a supposed outsider with an ill-defined suspicious past who seems to know more than is likely about the group. The numerous twists and eye-opening revelations will keep readers riveted. This offers a bounty of rewards. (June)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Come to provincial France and spend a lifetime with three best friends. They are ordinary in their extraordinariness as internationally best-selling author Perrin (Fresh Water for Flowers) brings these remarkable friends, who met in 1986, vividly to life. Having moved on into their adult years without remaining in touch, Adrien has become a writer; Nina is the manager of an animal shelter, and Étienne is a police officer. In 2017, they are reunited by mystery and tragedy when a car, assumed to be that of a schoolmate who disappeared from the village when she was 18, is found in a nearby lake. Narrator Elisabeth Lagelée adds much to this production with her lightly accented English but French pronunciation of names and phrases. Llisteners will feel like residents of the French countryside, where there are plenty of plot twists, tragedy, mystery, romance, and coming-of-age elements. VERDICT Fans of Perrin work will love this latest.--Laura Trombley
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A decades-old mystery comes back to haunt four childhood friends in this dark contemplation on growing up and apart. Set in La Comelle, a small French town, the novel centers on three close friends in the 1980s and '90s. Nina, Adrien, and Étienne meet in the fifth grade when they're all assigned to the same dreaded teacher, and they quickly become inseparable. Through adolescence and into their late teen years, the group sees each other through the highs and lows of growing up. Virginie, a classmate, wants to be friends with them as well, but she's always aware of the difference between the relationship they have with each other and the relationship she has with them. But by the time Virginie, now a journalist, moves back to La Comelle in the late 2010s, the three have largely lost touch. That changes when a submerged car is found in the lake where they once spent time together, a discovery that seems connected to the 1994 disappearance of an 18-year-old girl that haunts the four of them. While the mystery of the car and what it might contain is thrilling and heartbreaking, the real power of this work, translated from the French by Serle, is in the way Perrin captures the experience of growing up and the myriad ways Nina, Adrien, and Étienne give each other a place of safety--even as they are capable of inflicting great pain on others. While readers may want to know more about Virginie, her distance from the center of the story is fitting for the in-group, out-group tension that drives an underlying darkness from the very beginning. Tender and often raw, this moody novel is a complex tale of friendship wrapped around a mystery. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
