Review & Giveaway: Three Wishes by Goldberg, Jones and Ferdinand

~THIS GIVEAWAY IS CLOSED~

Three Wishes by Carey Goldberg, Beth Jones, and Pamela Ferdinand

What the book says: Carey, Beth, and Pam had succeeded at work but failed at romance, and each resolved to have a baby before time ran out. Just one problem: no men. Carey took the first bold step towards single motherhood, searching anonymous donor banks until she found the perfect match.


What she found was not a father in a vial, but a sort of magic potion. She met a man, fell in love, and got pregnant the old-fashioned way. She passed the vials to Beth, and it happened again. Beth met man, Beth got pregnant. Beth passed the vials to Pam, and the magic struck again. There were setbacks and disappointments, but three women became three families, reveling in the shared joy of love, friendship, and never losing hope.

About the Authors:

Carey Goldberg grew up in Newton, Massachusetts and decided in tenth grade that someday, she wanted to be a foreign correspondent in Moscow. She went to Yale and Harvard and eventually lived out her dream for six years, covering the collapse of the Soviet Union for the Associated Press and then The Los Angeles Times. In 1995, she came home to work for The New York Times and to “get a life.” She quickly rose to be Boston bureau chief of the Times but discovered that a life can be hard to get. When she turned 39, still unwed, she decided to become a single mother, and launched the chain of events described in this book. With the help of a year-long fellowship at MIT, she made the transition from general reporting to science journalism, and worked as a part-time health and science reporter at The Boston Globe for several years, covering brains and other organs. The Globe laid her off amid a sweeping cut of part-timers in early 2009, and she now happily writes books at home in the Brookline, Mass. house that she shares with her family.



From an early age, Beth Jones wanted to be a writer. She would buy blank books and fill them with her own stories. A rebel by age 13, she preferred to write than go to school. She was a student at Bennington College during the 1980s literary heyday with Bret Easton Ellis, Donna Tartt, Jill Eisenstadt, and Jonathan Lethem. After college, she hopped between jobs, moved to Europe with a boyfriend to try the expatriate lifestyle, and, when she returned, was admitted to Boston University’s graduate creative writing program. She’s been in Boston ever since, and is finally fulfilling her life’s ambition of publishing a book.Read an Excerpt

Jones is a freelance writer and educator. She has written for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and various magazines and websites. She taught writing and literature at Boston University, Emerson College, and in several Massachusetts prisons. She spent seven years running The Education Initiative, a school based behavioral medicine program, under the auspices of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School. She taught stress resiliency skills to educators and students from pre-school through college, primarily at inner city schools in Los Angeles, Boston, and Newark, NJ. In addition, she is an occasional contributor to National Public Radio. She lives outside Boston, with her husband and son.

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 19-year-old cat, Clementine, and remains a writer and journalist. Only a much happier one than ever before.

Here's what I think:

The first thing that struck me about this book was that it essentially braids together three woman's lives in one book. Each chapter is from a different one of the author's perspective. Usually this is rather frustrating for me because I get annoyed by the constant flip flop of voice. But this book was a pleasant surprise, in that although it was obvious when the story took the on a different point of view, the style of writing didn't change greatly, so it still flowed. As to the story, it is an amazing tale of three women faced (at different stages of life) with the tick tick tock of their biological clock. As I had all my children in my mid twenties, I can not directly related but can definitely empathize on the level that I don't know what life would be like without my children, and frankly don't want to think about it. This story doesn't have your traditional "and they all lived happily ever after" but it has a realistic and satisfying conclusion. A great read that would be great for a book club selection.

BUY IT! You can buy your own copy Amazon.


WIN IT! - Anna at HBG has agreed to send 3 lucky readers their own copy of Three Wishes!

So here is how you can win:



Mandatory Entry:
Tell me how old you were when you had your first child - I was 23. (open to US residents only, must provide mailing address - no PO Boxes - if you win)(you must do this one first or I will be forced to remove all of your entries)


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Disclaimer: Although I did receive a free copy of this book for review (Thanks, HBG), I was in no other way compensated to post this review. These are my real and honest opinions.


If you are an author or publisher and you would like for me to review your book, please contact me directly: polsen11[at]comcast[dot]net