Wednesday, May 26, 2010

THREE WISHES: REVIEW AND GIVEAWAY

GIVEAWAY ENDED
THREE WISHES

A True Story of Good Friends, Crushing Heartbreak,
and Astonishing Luck on Our Way to Love and Motherhood
BY CAREY GOLDBERG, BETH JONES,
AND PAMELA FERDINAND

ABOUT THE BOOK:

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.

BETH JONES: 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.

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.

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

REVIEW:

Carey Goldberg, Beth Jones, and Pamela Ferdinand are real life friends who together wrote the memoir-type story called THREE WISHES. This might be a fairy tale except for the fact that it is all true. As these three women were approaching 40 and single, they all were aware of their biological clocks and even more, how much they wanted to have a child. In THREE WISHES each of these three women takes a journey that includes having a child before it is too late and along the way, finding true love.

Their story of how they made their wishes come true to have a child can only be described as remarkable. From one friend to another, the gift of life was literally passed on and with it, twists and turns they never would have expected. I almost didn’t believe this could be a true story. The women are very candid as they share their personal lives in THREE WISHES. I found myself laughing at times at their humor and also crying with them at their despair. I think they are very brave in many ways especially with some of the lifelong difficult choices they had to make. The way that Carey, Beth, and Pam all become mothers is a story you have to read to believe. I can only hope their will be a sequel!

GIVEAWAY

THANKS TO KELLY AND THE GOOD
FOLKS AT THE HACHETTE BOOK GROUP,
I HAVE THREE COPIES OF THIS
AMAZING BOOK TO GIVE AWAY!


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