[amazon_link id=”1494553996″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ][/amazon_link]Title : Three Wishes
Author : Liane Moriarty
Narrator : Heather Wilds
Genre : Contemporary
Publisher : Tantor Audio
Listening Length : 11 hours 31 minutes
Rating : 2/5

From the Goodreads blurb:

Australian triplets Lyn, Cat, and Gemma Kettle are about to turn thirty-three and one is pregnant, one has just had her life turned upside down, and one is only just keeping hers from skidding off the fast lane. Meanwhile, their divorced parents have been behaving very oddly indeed.

In this family comedy by Liane Moriarty, we follow the three 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.

The above blurb attempts to lure you in with talk of a “family comedy”. Know that this is definitely not a family comedy; it is a tale of the three sisters, and they go through life’s ups and downs, more downs than ups; the book reeks of gloom and doom (those happy, colorful flowers on the cover are deceptive). So I did know what I was getting into; I just didn’t expect it to be this listless, given Moriarty’s reputation and obvious skill. The events in the trio’s lives happen in no particular order, and they do not lead to some big conclusion or poetic ending. The book then, is kinda choppy, flitting from one sister to the next, just one thing happening after another, with nary an end in sight. There is no plot, so to speak.

If you’ve been following my reviews, you know that I loved Moriarty’s “The Husband’s Secret” – it made my Best Audiobooks of 2014 List. That book had three main characters, tenuously connected. This book also has three main characters, very overtly connected, being triplets and all. But there end the similarities. While that book had well-developed characters, this one has them trite, cliched and too smart-alecky for my taste. Character development is so shallow that I couldn’t quite bring myself to care about any of the sisters at all.

This book is narrated by Heather Wilds. I haven’t heard her before, and I will give her the benefit of the doubt seeing the poor material she had to work with, but even so, I am unimpressed. Wilds has a nice melodious voice, but I couldn’t quite distinguish between the different character voices when they conversed – they all seemed just the same, which was a bummer, because there are so many characters and you would like to “feel” them differently.

It is ironical that I chanced upon a wonderful read, “The Chaperone”, because I thought that Liane Moriarty had authored it, and the book that Moriarty had actually authored (this one) turned out be such a dud. I guess Moriarty has improved over the years; “Three Wishes” was her first book, published in 2004, and “The Husband’s Secret” was published 9 years later. I still remain a Moriarty fan, although I will be careful from now on to only read her later books.