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Three wishes [sound recording (audio book)] / Liane Moriarty ; read by Caroline Lee.

By: Contributor(s): Material type: SoundSoundPublisher number: BAB 151115 | Bolinda AudioPublisher: Tullamarine, Victoria : Bolinda Audio, [2015]Copyright date: ℗2015Edition: UnabridgedDescription: 11 audio discs (CD) (13 hr., 50 min.) : digital, stereo ; 12 cm ; in containerContent type:
  • spoken word
Media type:
  • audio
Carrier type:
  • audio disc
ISBN:
  • 9781489055873
Other title:
  • 3 wishes [sound recording (audio book)]
Subject(s): Genre/Form: Read by Caroline Lee.Summary: Three sisters, one birthday, one little problem. The three Kettle sisters have had a mortifying mishap. Their raucous, champagne-soaked birthday dinner has come to an abrupt end following a violent argument and an emergency dash to the hospital. So who started it this time? Was it angry, hurt Cat, still recovering from the 'Night of the Spaghetti'? Was it Lyn, so serenely successful, at least on the outside? Or was it quirky, dreamy Gemma, the sister who can't keep a secret, except for the most important one of all?
Holdings
Item type Current library Collection Call number Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Talking Books Davis (Central) Library Talking Books Talking Books MOR Checked out 11/04/2024 T00812785
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The three Kettle sisters have had a mortifying mishap. Their raucous, champagne-soaked birthday dinner has come to an abrupt end following a violent argument and an emergency dash to the hospital. So who started it this time? Was it angry, hurt Cat, still recovering from the 'Night of the Spaghetti'? Was it Lyn, so serenely successful, at least on the outside? Or was it quirky, dreamy Gemma, the sister who can't keep a secret, except for the most important one of all?

Compact discs.

Read by Caroline Lee.

Three sisters, one birthday, one little problem. The three Kettle sisters have had a mortifying mishap. Their raucous, champagne-soaked birthday dinner has come to an abrupt end following a violent argument and an emergency dash to the hospital. So who started it this time? Was it angry, hurt Cat, still recovering from the 'Night of the Spaghetti'? Was it Lyn, so serenely successful, at least on the outside? Or was it quirky, dreamy Gemma, the sister who can't keep a secret, except for the most important one of all?

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Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Three Wishes Chapter One You could argue that it started thirty-four years ago when twenty-year-old Frank Kettle, a tall, fair, hyperactive ex-altar boy, fell madly in lust with Maxine Leonard, a long-legged languid redhead just a few days short of her nineteenth birthday. He was pumping with fresh testosterone. She knew better but did it anyway. In the backseat of Frank's dad's Holden. Twice. The first time involved a lot of head-bumping and grunting and breathless shifts of position, while Johnny O'Keefe bellowed at them from the car radio. The second time was slower and gentler and rather nice. Elvis soothingly suggested they love him tender. In each case, however, the terrible result was the same. One of Frank's exuberant little sperm cells slammed head-on with one of Maxine's rather less thrilled eggs, interrupting what should have been an uneventful journey to nonexistence. Over the following days, while Maxine was chastely dating more suitable boys and Frank was pursuing a curvy brunette, two freshly fertilized eggs were busily bumping their way along Maxine's fallopian tubes toward the haven of her horrified young uterus. At the exact moment Maxine allowed the very suitable Charlie Edwards to hold back her long red hair while she puffed out her cheeks and blew out nineteen candles, one egg fizzed with so much friction it split right in two. The other single egg burrowed its way comfortably in between the two new identical eggs. Guests at Maxine's birthday party thought they'd never seen her look so beautiful -- slender, glowing, almost incandescent! Who could have guessed she'd been impregnated with some Catholic boy's triplets? Frank and Maxine were married, of course. In their wedding photos, they both have the blank-eyed, sedated look of recent trauma victims. Seven months later, their triplet daughters came kicking and howling into the world. Maxine, who had never even held a baby before, was presented with three; it was the most despair-filled moment of her young life. Well, that would be Gemma's preference for how it started. Cat would argue that if she was going to begin with their conception, then why not go back through their entire family tree? Why not go back to the apes? Why not start with the Big Bang? I guess I did really, Gemma would chortle, Mum and Dad's big bang. Oh funn-y, Cat would say. Let's look at it logically, Lyn would interrupt. Quite clearly, it started the night of the spaghetti. And Lyn, quite naturally, would be right. It was a Wednesday night six weeks before Christmas. A nothing sort of night. An unassuming midweek night that should have vanished from their memories by Friday. " What did we do Wednesday? " " I don't know. Watch TV? " That's what they were doing. They were eating spaghetti and drinking red wine in front of the television. Cat was sitting crosslegged on the floor, with her back up against the sofa, her plate on her lap. Her husband, Dan, was sitting on the edge of the sofa, hunched over his dinner on the coffee table. It was the way they always ate dinner. Dan had cooked the spaghetti, so it was hearty and bland. Cat was the more accomplished cook. Dan's approach to cooking was somehow too functional. He stirred his ingredients like concrete mix, one arm wrapped around the bowl, the other stirring the gluggy mix so vigorously you could see his biceps working. "So what? Gets the job done." That Wednesday night Cat was feeling no specific emotion; not especially happy, not especially sad. It was strange afterward, remembering how she sat there, shoveling Dan's pasta into her mouth, so foolishly trusting of her life. She wanted to yell back at herself through time, Concentrate ! They were watching a show called Med School . It was a soap about a group of very beautiful young medical students with shiny white teeth and complex love lives. Each episode featured a lot of blood and sex and anguish. Cat and Dan shared a mild addiction to Med School . Whenever the plot took a new twist, they responded with loud enthusiasm, yelling at the television like children watching a pantomime: "Bastard!" "Dump him!" "It's the wrong medication !" This week Ellie (blond, cutesy, cropped T-shirt) was in a state. She didn't know whether to tell her boyfriend, Pete (dark, brooding, abnormal abs), about her drunken infidelity with a guest-starring troublemaker. "Tell him, Ellie!" said Cat to the television. "Pete will forgive you. He'll understand!" The ad break came on, and a manic man in a yellow jacket bounced around a department store pointing an incredulous finger at the Christmas specials. "I booked that health and beauty thing today," said Cat, using Dan's knee as a lever to help her reach over him for the pepper. "The woman had one of those gooey, spiritual voices. I felt like I was getting a massage just making a booking." For Christmas, she was giving her sisters (and herself) a weekend away at a health retreat in the Blue Mountains. The three of them would share an "exquisite experience" of "indulgent pampering." They would be wrapped in seaweed, dunked in mud, and slathered in vitamin-enriched creams. It would be extremely amusing. She was pleased with herself for thinking of it. "What a clever idea!" everyone would say on Christmas Day. Lyn definitely needed the stress relief. Gemma didn't need it but she'd be right into pretending that she did. Cat herself wasn't especially stressed either, but perhaps she was, because she wasn't pregnant and she'd been off the Pill now for nearly a year. "Don't get stressed about it," everybody said wisely, as if they were the first to pass on that hot little tip. Apparently, the moment your ovaries noticed you were worried about becoming pregnant, they refused to cooperate. Oh well, if you're going to get all huffy about it, we'll just close down ... Three Wishes . Copyright © by Liane Moriarty. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Three Wishes: A Novel by Liane Moriarty All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

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. Agent, Faye Bender. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

The Kettle sisters are a strange sight when they are together--a beautiful set of triplets, with two identical and one fraternal. Over the course of their thirty-third year, their lives all take turns no one could foresee. Lyn's perfectly scheduled and organized life begins to fray as debilitating panic attacks come on suddenly in parking lots; Cat, Lyn's identical twin, thinks her marriage is indestructible until her husband admits to having an affair with a young law student; and Gemma, who acts much younger than her sisters, goes from job to job and can't sustain a relationship with a man for longer than six months. Separately, they are strong, independent women struggling with divorce, pregnancy, parents, and jobs. Together, they are a force to be reckoned with as they fight with passion, laugh with gusto, and push each other to be their best selves. 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. --Carolyn Kubisz Copyright 2004 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

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. Sneering tone and choppy style mar this first novel, set in Sydney, from Australian author Moriarty. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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