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

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

Our generation of women have had more opportunities than our mothers. Women have spent more time in school, establishing careers, waiting longer to marry or start families.  By the time many of us felt ready for that next stage, we faced a quickly shrinking window of time.  In Three Wishes: A True Story of Good Friends, Crushing Heartbreak, and Astonishing Luck on Our Way to Love and Motherhood, three successful women journalists Carey Goldberg, Beth Jones, and Pamela Ferdinand tell their stories.  They’d each had terrible luck with men.  Each of them wanted to have children and, in their late thirties, they were no longer willing to wait for the right man.  

Former Boston bureau chief of the New York Times, Carey was ready to try a nontraditional path to motherhood.  After much consideration, she decides to do it on her own and finds an anonymous sperm donor.  The same day that vials arrive, she meets a  man, falls in love, and gets pregnant the regular way.  Carey offered the vials to her friend Beth who was recovering from a difficult divorce.  Before Beth can use the vials, she meets someone during an ice-climbing trip -- and falls in love and also gets pregnant.  Beth passes on the vials to their friend Pam, the eternal romantic.   Suddenly, Pam’s luck changes too -- and she finds herself in love and a mother.  Three Wishes is a true story of best friends who find that when they stop waiting for fairy-tale endings, their “happily ever afters” begins.

Three Wishes spoke to me.  I loved that these women became friends in their late thirties, when it seems like we have our own set of friends and are unlikely to branch out.  While the book tells their stories of love and motherhood, it's the friendships that engaged me, drew me in.  I saw Three Wishes as a book that celebrates the varied and difficult journeys that we each go through.  

ISBN-10: 0316079065 - Hardcover $24.99

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1 edition (April 6, 2010), 288 pages.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

About the Authors:

Carey Goldberg has been Boston bureau chief of the New York Times, Moscow correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, and most recently a health and science reporter at the Boston Globe.  She now writes happily at home, where she is developing thewikioflove.com

Beth Jones is a writer and educator who has contributed to the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and numerous academic journals; her next project is a novel.  She plans to climb many more frozen waterfalls.

Pamela Ferdinand is an award-winning freelance journalist and former reporter for the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and the Miami Herald.  She remains an incorrigible romantic.

Carey and Beth live near Boston with their families; Pamela and her family live outside Chicago.  Still close, the authors continue to believe in the power of good friends, love, and a little luck.