June: A Novel

Product Information

There’s an air of things closing down. Teachers wear shorts and T-shirts to class. They show movies while they clean out their desks. Nobody has the energy to care anymore. We’re all just counting down, passing time.” Would it be a total cop-out for me to say go buy a copy NOW and be done with it? Because, essentially, that's what this review (read: incoherent flailing and gushing) amounts to - a love letter to this beautiful, haunting book of the glamorous days of old school Hollywood, a small town turned upside-down by the arrival of a film crew, and a secret steadfastly kept close for over sixty years. Painted battleship grey, the Palm House survived the bombing of London during the second world war. Incredibly, it was almost demolished in the 1950s due to its poor state of repair. In the 1980s it was restored after being dismantled like “an immense Meccano kit”. But the humidity means that a further restoration is due. In this age of climate crisis it is needed more than ever to teach new generations about the importance of rainforests and endangered palms. We can heal. Perhaps we can return to that same place we once stood, when we were both young and innocent.”

June Releases Books - Goodreads

From 2015 (present) day to 1955 (past), a multi-layered complex coming-of-age tale of redemption, love, loss and family. It was so popular that the number of visitors doubled in 1849 to 138,000. Access to Kew Gardens was free, though you had to be “respectably attired”. As one newspaper said of the palms it contained, “we live in a wonderful age when these gigantic children of the sun can be induced to live and flourish among us”.

Teltscher’s richly researched biography of this iconic structure is not just about the design and construction of this remarkable building, but also about plants, people and power in the Victorian age: “the Palm House provides a glittering prism through which to view Britain’s real and imagined place in the world.”

15 New Books Coming in June - The New York Times

I received a complimentary copy of this book from Ballantine Books through NetGalley. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own. Norah is a reluctant if expansive narrator, pushing herself to consider intractable things. She is already the author of five novels, in which, she says, there is not much sex or violence: people “just realise things and feel a little sad”. But the story “shouting out to be written” is that of her famous mother, who went crazy and shot an influential film producer in the foot. I did have a few issues with this book. This story is filled with secrets but I wasn't surprised by any of them as they were revealed. If June had had an honest conversation with Cassie before her death, much of the story wouldn't have even needed to happen. I guess I kept waiting for that big moment or event to really blow me away in this book but I just didn't get it. I wanted an epic love story but this didn't feel like one to me. I really felt like the story dragged during much of the book and I had no trouble setting it aside. The last 20% or so was pretty exciting but I wish that there had been a little excitement sprinkled in other areas of the book.

Book of the Month – June 2021

This book, then, is both the story of a life derailed by abuse and a study into the ways abusers control their victims. It took Davies until he was 51 to go to the police which, he notes, made him “five years older than my dad had been the last time he molested me”. Davies says that the writing of Just Ignore Him wasn’t merely an exercise in healing. “Above all,” he writes, “I have set out to tell you the things you don’t know about me, in the hope that one day, perhaps, you will feel able to tell someone what they don’t know about you.”