Three Days in June by Anne Tyler

It's a shame, but I didn't feel that this one completely hit the mark for me. It started off in a promising way, and I was totally onboard with Gail Baines as a somewhat dowdy woman in her early sixties who was trying to prepare herself for her only daughter's wedding, but somewhere around the middle of the book, it all seemed to veer off course.

School teacher Gail lives alone in a small house that she bought for herself after her divorce. Her ex husband lives miles away, but he will of course be attending the wedding, and she finds herself getting irritated just remembering how messy he is and how annoying he could be. At this stage it is easy to picture Gail as she struggles with the idea of making herself presentable for the wedding and doesn't even want to go to the expense of buying something new to wear.

As the title suggests, the book covers three days in June, and those three days are the wedding day, the day before and the day after. Everything that takes place in those three days works well, but then the back story is introduced and I really struggled to match the present day Gail with some parts of the old one. Gail was one of those oddball types as a student, and it came as a surprise to her as much as anyone else that Max (later her husband) loved her and thought 'she hung the moon' (this bit works). Their relationship is totally believable, but when it comes to the part where they split up, Gail seems to be someone else and for me it didn't work so well.

The problem is, that Anne Tyler has written two of my favourite books (The Accidental Tourist and The Spool of Blue Thread) and she has set such a high bar in my mind that I always want more of the same. If someone else had written this book I probably wouldn't be trying to pick holes in it.

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