Gail Baines is long divorced from her husband Max, and not especially close to her grown daughter Debbie. Today is the day before Debbie's wedding. To start, Gail loses her job—or quits, depending who you ask. Then, Max arrives unannounced on Gail's doorstep, carrying a cat, without a place to stay and without even a suit in which to walk their daughter down the aisle. But the true crisis lands when Debbie shares with her parents a secret she has just learned about her husband-to-be. It will not only throw the wedding itself into question but also send Gail back into her past and how her own relationship fell apart.
A svelte, finely constructed novel ... In my carping youth, I regarded the recurrent elements of Anne Tyler’s stories as a flaw. But I’ve grown to see her decades-long focus on quirky families and wounded people as no more limiting than the rules for writing a sonnet. With a sufficiently powerful microscope, a drop of water reveals the ocean.
This is not Tyler’s best novel, nor is it her worst, though it’s closer to the bottom than to the top ... Three Days in June is the sort of novel in which characters get pretty excited about microwaving a pair of potpies ... The pages did not turn themselves, but it is good enough that I did not resent my fingers for doing the job.
