One Two Three by Laurie Frankel

Amy  

fiction, young adult

Three sisters—triplets—have different physical and mental abilities and live in a very small town in which many residents have various medical problems.  There used to be a chemical plant in the town which had, apparently, poisoned them.

One Two Three sucked me in immediately. Or, rather, the main characters and their situations sucked me in immediately. You might think this would be a depressing story. But the way it is written, it is actually quite hopeful and filled with lovable characters.

I loved the creativity of the story line, the crafting of the tale between the three sisters’ points of view, and the themes of acceptance, diversity, appreciation, survival, adaptability, accommodation, and accountability. Not only was the central family a pleasure to get to know, but so were a few of their friends in town. I had heard about a similar real-life situation and this novel’s immersion into the residents’ reality was enlightening. As with the other novel I read by Laurie Frankel (This Is How It Always Is), the humor peppered throughout the tense situations was a joy. She is so good at sharing and explaining the viewpoints of those people who would otherwise be in the margins, misunderstood, and “undervoiced” (which is a term she, herself, mentioned in the audio interview after the novel). I truly appreciate her writing style and her topic choices.

The audiobook was very well done with three different actresses voicing the three sisters. I thought they were all good voice actors. They didn’t all have equal range of voice repertoires but they were a credit to the novel. I give the ensemble Jesse Vilinsky, Emma Galvin, and Rebecca Soler an A-. My favorite was Emma Galvin, who voiced Monday. She was perfectly cast!  The other thing I loved was that Mirabel’s speech-generated voice was actually engineered that way in the production. It made it seem much more authentic. I was very pleasantly surprised when the audiobook producer interviewed the author at the end of the audiobook and they discussed this very topic!  I was impressed with the producer’s decisions with this audiobook.