One Two Three
𝘖𝘯𝘦 𝘛𝘸𝘰 𝘛𝘩𝘳𝘦𝘦 gets One Two Three Four Five stars. It’s breathtaking, beautiful, brilliant. It’s unspeakably sad and unexpectedly funny. And it’s one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.
The “One Two Three” of the title refers to the triplets Mab, Monday, and Mirabel, who live with their mother in Bourne, a small town devastated by toxic chemicals deliberately dumped into the river by a company called Belsum Chemical. No one has escaped unscathed: the triplets lost their father; and their mother, Nora, is a daytime therapist, a nighttime bartender, and a full-time Erin Brockovich who has been trying for the past 16 years to get justice for the mutilations and mutations and miscarriages. The whole town is “poor and poisoned”; it’s the only place where you can be missing half of your upper torso and no one stares.
Mab is one of the few without disabilities, which automatically makes her both a “Track A” student and a tutor; Monday is neurodivergent and the town’s de facto librarian, meticulously cataloguing and lending cast-off books out of their home; and Mirabel, beautiful and brilliant, is confined to a wheelchair and has only the use of one hand, communicating through a device that the local handyman rigged up. And so it goes in a town that is going nowhere; where the survivors cling not to hope, but to each other.
Then suddenly everything changes when the owners of Belsum Chemical move in to reopen the plant. It’s really a PR stunt to gain the confidence of the townspeople, but things get complicated when the triplets meet River, the ironically named and impossibly healthy and whole teenage son of the enemy. Mab falls for him, as does Mirabel; one of the most poignant passages in the book is Mirabel’s meditation on the ableist assumption that she wouldn’t or couldn’t or shouldn’t have a physical relationship with someone.
It turns out that River may literally hold the key to the past, and the future. If Nora is Erin Brockovich, then her daughters are Nancy Drew, determined to catch the criminals, or at least stop them. Part love story, part legal thriller, 𝘖𝘯𝘦 𝘛𝘸𝘰 𝘛𝘩𝘳𝘦𝘦 is all heart.
