book review three wishes

Three Wishes

Liane moriarty.

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

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"The bills would keep on coming, no matter what else was happening in your life and that was good because it gave you purpose. You worked so you could pay them. You rested on the weekends and generated more bills. Then you went back to work to pay for them. That was the reason for getting up tomorrow. That was the meaning of life."

"Death was the hot bath you promised yourself while you endured small talk and uncomfortable shoes. You could stop pretending to have a good time when you were dead."

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Review: Three Wishes by Liane Moriarty

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Three Wishes is not my favorite book by Liane Moriarty. Nevertheless, it is a good book that I was deeply committed and engaged it. Three Wishes follows the lives of 33 year old triplets- Lyn, Cat and Gemma Kettle. Cat has recently discovered a secret about her marriage. Lyn is dealing with a step-daughter, baby, and internal struggles. And Gemma’s relationship never seems to last after the six month mark. The book explores the lives of the three sisters through laughter, heartbreak, and happiness. The center themes in this book are marriage, family and children.

Like all of Liane Moriarty’s book, Three Wishes had a mellow and easy flow. It felt conversational and quirky.  Although simple, the writing packed a punch with dark undertones. It was never predictable or repetitive.

The story was told through multiple perspectives. And because all of the sisters were unique it was never hard to guess which POV I was in. It was interesting to see how the sisters interacted with each other. They didn’t always play fair or even agree with one another, but somehow in the end they always supported each other. It felt like a true sisterhood that featured the good and the bad.

I think one of my favorite things about Three Wishes is that it featured passages from onlookers- those who had encountered the sisters over the years. So in addition to getting an insider look at the family, you get to see the family from another angle which was interesting. And it made me think about how many people who I have encountered on the street that may not have impacted me but I had impacted them in a way that made our small encounter memorial.

Like mentioned earlier, Three Wishes is not my favorite book by Laine Moriarty. The ending was not as strong as I had hoped. I would have much rather had a definite ending for Cat like her sisters had gotten.

Final Analysis

Three Wishes is a funny and lovable tale about three sisters who are dealing with life in the best way they can. It features strong relatable characters and quirky narrative.

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THREE WISHES

by Liane Moriarty ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2004

Sneering tone and choppy style mar this first novel, set in Sydney, from Australian author Moriarty.

Meet the Kettle sisters: 33-year-old triplets.

Gemma, Cat, and Lynne had the childhood from hell, thanks to their battling parents, and they still haven’t decided what they want to be when they grow up— if they grow up. They haven’t forgiven Mum and Dad and they can’t forget, for example, their sixth birthday party, when their father lit a firecracker and blew his finger off (it was preserved in Formaldehyde as a gruesome memento of the occasion). How ironic: it was his ring finger—an apt symbol of an explosive marriage. Some years later, after their parents’ divorce, the sisters leave home to confront hard truths about life and love. Family secrets and garden-variety troubles are trotted out in no particular order: Mum’s miscarriage. Frail but feisty granny. Unfaithful husbands and useless boyfriends. Happy ending? Oh, why not.

Pub Date: June 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-06-058612-5

Page Count: 352

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

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by Liane Moriarty

THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.

In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring  passeurs : people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the  Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3

Page Count: 448

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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A LITTLE LIFE

by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees , 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.  

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

GENERAL FICTION

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by Hanya Yanagihara

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Three Wishes by Liane Moriarty

• Publication Date: May 24, 2005
• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• ISBN-10: 0060586133
• ISBN-13: 9780060586133
• About the Book
• Reading Guide (PDF)

Liane Moriarty is one of my favorite authors of all time. Her books such as What Alice Forgot, Nine Perfect Strangers and Her Husband’s Secret are among my all time favorites. Of course I’ve also read her more popular books Big Little Lies and Truly Madly Guilty , but these did not make my favorites list. Neither did Three Wishes , unfortunately.

“Lyn, Cat, and Gemma Kettle, beautiful thirty-three-year-old triplets, seem to attract attention everywhere they go. Whenever they’re together, laughter, drama, and mayhem seem to follow. But apart, each is very much her own woman, dealing with her own share of ups and downs.” Goodreads

It only took me a week to read this book so I’m not saying that I hated it. I just didn’t connect with it the way I do with this authors other books. Another issue may be that I’m an only child so it’s hard to imagine being a triplet? I’m not quite sure what caused the disconnect but it was there.

Also, I’m not the only one who felt this way. The reviews on Goodreads are not great. Many people seem to agree with me that the book wasn’t particularly exciting or going anywhere. It started with a dramatic moment and most of the book was the lead-up to how it happened.

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Maybe the issue is that I’m used to psychological thrillers with gut-wrenching and unexpected twists. Three Wishes is a heartwarming story that mostly revolves around complex family relations. The twists and climaxes here are not so dramatic. The biggest two are also quite predictable but they were still exciting moments.

Do I regret putting in the time to read this book? Definitely not. But it wasn’t my jam. Before you write it off completely, Pretty Little Lies wasn’t my thing either. I had trouble following the story line and I read two other books in between struggling to finish it. Once I did, I was glad I finished because, unlike Three Wishes , Pretty Little Lies did have some huge twists. It also had an aspect of darkness that I enjoy in books.

So don’t write this book off just because I didn’t love it. If you love the author, you will enjoy it. And if you’re a triplet or have a big complicated family, you’ll relate to it. At the moment, Three Wishes remains my least favorite book by Liane Moriarty. I’m only halfway through Last Anniversary though, and I still have The Hypnotist’s Love Story  to read!

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Three Wishes: A Novel

About this ebook.

The funny, heartwarming, and completely charming first novel from Liane Moriarty, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Nine Perfect Strangers and Big Little Lies.    

Lyn, Cat, and Gemma Kettle, beautiful thirty-three-year-old triplets, seem to attract attention everywhere they go. Together, laughter, drama, and mayhem follow them, but apart, each is dealing with her own share of ups and downs.  

Lyn has organized her life into one big checklist, Cat has just learned a startling secret about her marriage, and Gemma, who bolts every time a relationship hits the six-month mark, holds out hope for lasting love. 

In this wise, witty, and hilarious novel, we follow the Kettle sisters through their tumultuous thirty-third year as they deal with sibling rivalry and secrets, revelations and relationships, unfaithful husbands and unthinkable decisions, and the fabulous, frustrating life of forever being part of a trio. 

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About the author

Liane Moriarty is the number-one New York Times bestselling author of Big Little Lies, The Husband's Secret, and What Alice Forgot, as well as The Hypnotist's Love Story, Three Wishes, The Last Anniversary, and the Nicola Berry series for children. Liane lives in Sydney, Australia, with her husband and two children. www.lianemoriarty.com.au

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Three Wishes

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“Moriarty’s first novel, written with wisdom, humor, and sincerity, is an honest look at sisters who have a bond stronger than anything life throws their way.” — Booklist The funny, heartwarming, and completely charming first novel from Liane Moriarty, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Nine Perfect Strangers and Big Little Lies.     Lyn, Cat, and Gemma Kettle, beautiful thirty-three-year-old triplets, seem to attract attention everywhere they go. Together, laughter, drama, and mayhem follow them, but apart, each is dealing with her own share of ups and downs.   Lyn has organized her life into one big checklist, Cat has just learned a startling secret about her marriage, and Gemma, who bolts every time a relationship hits the six-month mark, holds out hope for lasting love.  In this wise, witty, and hilarious novel, we follow the Kettle sisters through their tumultuous thirty-third year as they deal with sibling rivalry and secrets, revelations and relationships, unfaithful husbands and unthinkable decisions, and the fabulous, frustrating life of forever being part of a trio. 

APPLE BOOKS REVIEW

Before Big Little Lies , Liane Moriarty granted readers Three Wishes . Moriarty’s debut novel is the story of the drama-prone Kettle triplets on the night of their 34th birthdays, just as the celebration suddenly turns ugly. As we learn the truth about what happened, Moriarty juggles multiple voices, letting anecdotes from friends and outsiders intersect with the Kettle sisters’ stories. The revelations are soap opera–level juicy, the story moves at full tilt, and Moriarty’s trademark conversational style and dark humor are center stage. Close your eyes and make a wish of your own that everyone gets what they deserve.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY JUN 7, 2004

Three chick-lit heroines are better than one in Moriarty's witty debut starring Sydney-based triplets Cat, Gemma and Lyn Kettle. Borrowing a convention from mystery novels, Moriarty opens with a prologue whose events must be explained through subsequent chapters: in this case, what led one sis to imbed a fondue fork in another sis's pregnant belly at their 34th birthday celebration dinner? Moriarty gleefully describes the triplets' turbulent previous year, which forces them to abandon the roles they've played since childhood. Sarcastic and abrasive marketing executive Cat must grapple with her husband Dan's affair, a miscarriage and a drinking problem, while flighty Gemma, a full-time house sitter, probes her fears of commitment when she meets charming locksmith Charlie. Lyn, a successful entrepreneur, wife and mother, has perfected the art of time management ("Sex with husband. Check"), but she's quietly seized by bouts of panic. Despite such unoriginal problems, Moriarty's novel is a winning combination of smart-alecky fun and feel-good mush (mostly the former). Her writing is smart and playful ("Death was the hot bath you promised yourself while you endured small talk and uncomfortable shoes"), her characters are quirky and lovable and her clever plot turns like the rekindled love between the triplets' divorced parents are fun. Convenient coincidences and a general predictability don't distract too much from the sassy pleasures.

Customer Reviews

An interesting book.

The story flowed well, but I found the characters a little unbelievable at times. But it kept me reading.

Loved the characters and the family dynamic in this book! Such a fun read...highly recommend!

Loved this book!

I enjoyed getting to know this family so much that I was surprised and disappointed when I reached the end. I felt like I was living their life along with them and I was so sorry that I didn’t get to continue doing so. This is a fun, heartfelt, lovely read.

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THREE WISHES

Liane moriarty, . . harpercollins, $21.95 (356pp) isbn 978-0-06-058612-6.

Reviewed on: 06/07/2004

Genre: Fiction

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Three Wishes

40 pages • 1 hour read

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Summary and Study Guide

Three Wishes (2003) is the debut novel by Australian author Liane Moriarty. Categorized as British and Irish humor and satire , the novel immediately became a New York Times Bestseller. The tone of Three Wishes is generally light and funny, despite its serious issues of adultery, divorce, abusive romantic partners, and the complications of pregnancy. The story is told from the limited third-person perspective of the sisters and the first-person perspective of several anonymous observers. The location is contemporary Sydney, Australia. Because the book was originally published in 2003, some of the temporal references may seem slightly dated. As the novel follows the adventures of the colorful Kettle sisters, it examines the themes of multiple-birth identity, learning when to hold on and when to let go, and the necessity for attitude adjustments in the face of life’s changing circumstances.

All page citations are taken from the Kindle edition of this book.

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Plot Summary

The novel begins with the Kettle triplets—Catriona “Cat” Kettle, Lyn Kettle , and Gemma Kettle—celebrating their collective 34th birthday at an elegant seafood restaurant in Sydney. The events of the evening are told from the perspective of other witnesses, but everyone agrees that Cat accuses the other two of ruining her life and throws a fondue fork that lodges in Gemma’s pregnant abdomen. Chaos ensues as all three are carted off to the hospital.

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What brought the Kettle girls to this crisis is the subject of the rest of the book as the narrative traces their lives, starting with their unintended birth to 19-year-old parents. Cat and Lyn are identical, while Gemma is a fraternal twin. The three are extremely close but emotionally dramatic and combative toward one another. Cat is intense and competitive; Lyn is the family overachiever; and Gemma drifts through life with no sense of direction. The trouble starts when Cat’s husband announces that he’s having an affair with a woman named Angela. Cat is enraged and becomes angrier when she learns that Angela is the sister of Gemma’s latest boyfriend, Charlie. Because Cat hasn’t been able to get pregnant, she is also jealous that Lyn has a daughter.

The plot thickens after Cat conceives a baby but has a miscarriage. Gemma also becomes pregnant but is unprepared to care for a child, so she promises it to Cat. During their birthday celebration, Gemma changes her mind, and Cat throws a fondue fork at her. This episode serves as a wake-up call for the siblings as each one makes an effort to eliminate destructive behavior patterns. Lyn learns how to become less of a perfectionist; Gemma learns how to hold onto a good relationship and her baby; and Cat learns to let go of what she can’t control and start a new life for herself. Fortunately, all three sisters mend their ways before wreaking havoc in another Sydney restaurant on their next birthday.

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A Summary and Analysis of ‘The Three Wishes’: A Curious Fairy Tale

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The pattern of three is deeply imbedded in the structure of the fairy tale. Numerous fairy stories, from Goldilocks and the three bears to Rumpelstiltskin to the story of Snow White (to name but three) rely in part on the tripartite narrative structure (three bears, three bowls of porridge, three visits to the house, three nights, and so on). But perhaps the most concentrated example of this patterning is the fairy tale titled ‘The Three Wishes’, where the entire story hinges on the granting of three wishes to a character.

In summary, the story of the three wishes runs as follows. A man and his wife are poor and wish they were happier and better off, especially compared with their neighbours. At that moment, a fairy appears to them, and says she will grant them their next three wishes, but no more. After the fairy disappears, the husband and wife mull over their wishes.

The wife says it makes sense to wish to be handsome, rich, and ‘of good quality’. But the husband replies: you can be good-looking and rich but still be sick, full of worry, and end up dying young. So it’s better to ask for good health, happiness, and a long life. The wife retorts: but what use is a long life lived in poverty? They decide to sleep on it, and so go about their tasks at home.

As the wife is tending to the fire to keep them warm, she sees how good the fire is, and says to herself, ‘I wish we had a giant bit of black pudding over the fire, as that would cook a treat’. In an instant, a yard of black pudding comes tumbling down the chimney and onto the fire.

The husband, seeing his wife had wasted one of their three wishes, says, ‘You fool, I wish that black pudding was stuck to your stupid nose.’ And so it was: the black pudding attaches itself to the wife’s nose, and is stuck fast. The husband curses himself for being stupider than his wife. He says they should wish for something sensible for their final wish, like riches, but the wife says that all the riches in the world would be no good to her if she had to have a black pudding stuck to her nose for the rest of her life.

So the husband reluctantly allows his wife to wish for the black pudding to be removed from her nose – and so it is. They have used up their three wishes and all they have to show for it is a black pudding. The husband decides that from now on they should wish for nothing, and be happy with their lot.

The above summary is of the version of the three wishes tale which Iona and Peter Opie collected in their definitive anthology of fairy stories, The Classic Fairy Tales , but as the Opies note in their fascinating introduction to this story, the tale of the three wishes has a long and complex history.

Like many other fairy tales, versions of ‘The Three Wishes’ are found, in slightly different form, in medieval Persian texts, eighteenth-century French volumes of fairy tales, and even, perhaps, in a collection of fables attributed to the ninth-century Saxon king, Alfred the Great.

The pattern of the three wishes extends far beyond traditional fairy tales, however, and can be seen in the tale of Aladdin and the magic lamp and in the wonderful Edwardian story by W. W. Jacobs, ‘ The Monkey’s Paw ’, to say nothing of that other Edwardian classic, this one for children, namely E. Nesbit’s trilogy of novels featuring the Psammead .

One of the most curious of these sister-tales to ‘The Three Wishes’ is the one found in a ninth-century Persian book, commonly known as The Book of the Seven Sages . In that version of the story, a husband and wife are visited by a friendly spirit and granted three wishes. In consultation with his wife, the husband requests that he be generously endowed with the means of satisfying his wife.

The wish is granted, but the husband finds that he is now so well-endowed that he is weighed down by his new ‘gift’.

So for his second wish he asks that all that embarrasses him be removed. When the wish is granted, he finds that he has been left, in the Victorian Andrew Lang’s delicate phrase, with ‘a frightful minus quantity’. The third wish is for his original, more modest ‘endowment’ to be restored. Black puddings are swapped for something else meaty and sausage-shaped in this version, it would seem.

The moral of the story is curious. It cannot be analysed as a case of ‘be careful what you wish for’, since, in the tale of the three wishes, the protagonists don’t end up worse off than they started. But nor do they end up better off either. Instead, they end up exactly back where they started, because they have foolishly and recklessly not made the most of the wishes on offer.

With this in mind, it may be that the tale was conceived as a reminder of the folly inherent in human nature: we wish for things idly all the time, and even if those wishes could instantaneously be made reality, we’d still frivolously misuse them for short-term gain, myopically unable to see how more prudent wishing might serve us better in the long run.

This is made more poignant in the version of the story summarised above, since the husband and wife sit down and carefully discuss which wishes it would be wisest to make, but then carelessly go and wish for trivial things in the course of going about their lives. To quote a cliché, ‘give a man a fish and he can feed himself for a day; teach him how to fish and he can feed himself and his family for a lifetime.’ The wishers in ‘The Three Wishes’ very much fall into the ‘give us a fish’ category, rather than the latter.

Or, to quote another proverb: ‘If wishes were horses, the Devil would ride.’ In ‘The Three Wishes’, wishes are horses, in that they are made reality. But the protagonists, not devils but merely flawed and silly human beings, end up riding round in circles.

Perhaps the ultimate moral of ‘The Three Wishes’, in the last analysis, is found in the husband’s words at the end of the fairy tale: one should wish for nothing and either be happy with one’s lot or strive to improve it oneself. Relying on wishes from supernatural benefactors is a dangerous and unreliable game, after all.

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2 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of ‘The Three Wishes’: A Curious Fairy Tale”

Glad you included “The Monkey’s Paw” in your list of similar tales. It is one of my favourite short stories and the consequences of the first two wishes are certainly more frightening than having a black pudding stuck on your nose!

Funny you should remind us of this now. I have just written a ‘three wishes’ tale to read out at a charity gig we are putting on called “Tunes and Tales.” In it a grandmother and her granddaughter find a silver teapot on the beach. Without realising it is magic the grandmother asks that the dull day become sunny and the weather improves. She wishes out loud that her husband was not so ill. The girl takes the teapot home but it rattles. When they arrive home the grandfather is feeling better. Grandma suspects the teapot is magic but doesn’t quite believe it. She would have liked to wish for riches. Upstairs the girl looks down the spout to see what is rattling in the teapot. It is large, red and shiny. She wishes she could open the lid…..

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Book Review: Three Wishes by Liane Moriarty

“Try not to saddle yourself with too distinct a personality too early in life. It might not suit you later on.”

Published in 2003, Three Wishes by Liane Moriarty follows Lyn, Cat, and Gemma Kettle, beautiful thirty-three-year-old triplets, who seem to attract attention everywhere they go. Whenever they’re together, laughter, drama, and mayhem seem to follow. But apart, each is very much her own woman, dealing with her own share of ups and downs.

Lyn has organized her life into one big checklist, juggling the many balls of work, marriage, and motherhood with expert precision, but is she as together as her datebook would have her seem? Cat has just learned a startling secret about her marriage – can she bring another life into her very precarious world? And can free-spirited Gemma, who bolts every time a relationship hits the six-month mark, ever hope to find lasting love?

Sometimes I find myself in the mood for a Liane Moriarty drama, and I always enjoy the audiobook narrations of her books. I could listen to Caroline Lee all day!!

Three Wishes is a lot less eventful than other books I have read by Moriarty, but I love the way she explores people and relationships. She gets inside her character’s heads so well, and the premise of showing how different triplets can really allow her to get explore the different ways we think, act, and react.

If you like Moriarty, then there will be a lot you like about this book. For newbies to her books, I’d recommend starting elsewhere!

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Wishes Toys Books and Games

Location & Hours

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8700 NE Vancouver Mall Dr

Vancouver Mall

Vancouver, WA 98662

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Family owed business who are all very friendly. They have a great selection of quality toys for young and old. I particularly like their old school toys they have. Board game selection is quite nice as well. Fun shop to check out and I like to stop in often.

Clean store, super friendly staff, huge selection of board games, toys, and gifts. Prices are higher than big, huge, evil Schmal-Schmart stores. But that mall rent is sky high, so I understand.

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Three Wishes: A True Story of Good Friends, Crushing Heartbreak, and Astonishing Luck on Our Way to Love and Motherhood Hardcover – April 6, 2010

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Print length 288 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Little, Brown and Company
• Publication date April 6, 2010
• Dimensions 5.5 x 0.75 x 8.25 inches
• ISBN-10 0316079065
• ISBN-13 978-0316079068
• See all details

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From publishers weekly, about the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Little, Brown and Company; 1st edition (April 6, 2010)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0316079065
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0316079068
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.6 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.75 x 8.25 inches
• #20,790 in Marriage
• #42,960 in Women's Biographies
• #131,868 in Memoirs (Books)

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About the authors

Carey goldberg.

Carey Goldberg has been a Moscow correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, Boston bureau chief for the New York Times, and most recently a health and science reporter at The Boston Globe. She now writes and edits happily at home.

Pamela Ferdinand

An award-winning journalist for major U.S. newspapers-including The Boston Globe, Miami Herald, and Washington Post-for more than a decade, Pamela covered breaking news from Hurricane Andrew and the crash of TWA Flight 800 to the Roman Catholic church crisis and New England's connections to the September 11 terrorism attacks. She served as The Washington Post's New England correspondent in Boston for six years and was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2003-2004.

She has written on a wide range of topics for magazines and Web sites such as The Economist, Boston, The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, and National Geographic News, among others, and she has been an associate producer for WBUR-FM in Boston and an adjunct journalism professor at Boston University. She also has enjoyed writer residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Dorset Colony House in Vermont.

A lifelong romantic, she assumed she would meet her soulmate along the way, fall in love, and have children. Nearing 40, she realized that assumption might be wrong and prepared for single motherhood with anonymous donor sperm given to her by "Three Wishes" co-author Beth Jones. (Beth received it from co-author Carey Goldberg.) No sooner had she accepted the vials, then Pam encountered luck and love in unexpected ways. She lives in Chicago with her family, and remains a writer, editor, and journalist. Only a much happier one than ever before.

For more information, please visit "www.pamelaferdinand.com"

I've wanted to publish a book since I was eight years old. Before achieving that goal, I was a journalist (Boston Globe, NY Times, various magazines), an educator - teaching stress resiliency in urban schools from Newark, NJ to Boston, to East and South Central LA. I taught creative writing and literature in the Massachusetts prison system, as well as at Boston University and Emerson College. I was once a pretty good rock and ice climber, and now I don't do much of either, but one day, I will again. I have a great road bike and a mountain bike, and I'm very proud that I learned to ride them with cleats (it might have been a prouder accomplishment than getting my driver's license all those years ago). I think life is fun, if you live it. But you have to grab it sometimes and hold on.

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