Cat felt that sense of pleasure and pride she always felt when she saw her sisters in public. ‘Look at them!’ she wanted to say to people. ‘My sisters. Aren’t they great? Aren’t they annoying?’” After reading most of Liane Moriarty’s novels, it was interesting to read her debut. Although you call tell that’s she certainly honed her craft since then, her trademark humour and deep understanding of her characters shines through. Nobody writes female characters as well as she does and the three sisters in this novel are so well drawn you would recognise them in an instant if you met them. I liked all the sisters as they try to get their lives straightened out. The sister who seems to have it all is barely holding it together. Another sister made me afraid to ever fall in the love again. The other sister I thought had a slightly too facile reaction to a past relationship in terms of the mistakes she continued to make with men. But all in all, I enjoyed the story, the well-drawn characters, and, of course, Moriarty’s writing. Here’s another bit of gold “Someone did a ladylike fart during Beginners Yoga for Mums-to-Be”. It doesn’t get better than that. Down to earth and a touch self-deprecating, AKA real! Sensible Lyn is struggling to balance being a mother, wife and businesswoman without losing her mind.

The Kettle sisters depicted and their various partners, exes and rellies all seem so real and will 'live on' in your mind - no joke. I particularly loved the quirky, dreamy triplet Gemma - the other two, Cat and Lyn, were a bit harder around the edges, but very realistically painted. I really like Liane Moriarty. The ex-advertising copywriter delivers Sydney based tales featuring gritty women who have loud, forthright conversations and live complex, secret ridden lives. I’ve heard her output described as chic lit, but but this feels like a diminishment of what are uniformly snappy, funny and often hard hitting stories. My advice is grab one and judge for yourselves – if you’re not already a convert, that is. Her novel Big Little Lies was adapted into a television series by HBO, [2] and stars Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Shailene Woodley, Laura Dern, Zoë Kravitz, and Alexander Skarsgård. The series premiered on 19 February 2017, with the first season concluding on 2 April 2017. [3] A second season was announced in December 2017. [4] Season two premiered in June 2019.Gemma, is the whishy-washy one. She was once engaged to a moody, controlling man who so happened to walk in front of a bus, literally. Since then, she has floated around and house sits. She has no permanent place or person in her life. She meets Charlie and finds him to be "the one", however, she struggles with the fact that his sister is having an affair with her sister Cat's husband. She eventually becomes pregnant and in the end, she's with Charlie and they live happily ever after. Lyn, Cat, and Gemma Kettle, beautiful thirty-three-year-old triplets, seem to attract attention everywhere they go. Together, laughter, drama, and mayhem follow them, but apart, each is dealing with her own share of ups and downs. This is Moriarty’s debut novel, written in 2003 with plenty of insight and humour and empathy for both the parents (now separated and sparring) and their 30-something daughters who have the same problems their mother had and many young women have. It’s just that things seem magnified when everything is tripled. When one hurts, they all hurt, at least after two of them have finished scolding and carrying on about how the third (injured) one shouldn’t have been doing whatever she was doing at the time. Everything I love about Moriarty is evident in this novel, the almost whimsical quality of the story, the dark undertones, and loads of emotions and family drama, but alas, this one fell a little flat for me. Your favorite kind of writing is easy, yet insightful prose. Can any other author cut to the heart of honest human behavior quite as well as Liane Moriarty? Not in my book, which is why I’ve (now) read all of hers.

The story follows three triplet sisters, in their thirties, who all have very different personalities and outlooks on life and explores how their complex relationships with each other withstand all the dramas that life throws at them. Spoiler alert: a lot.

Diaries & Calendars

The writing was okay but like I said, I didn't like two MCs so I just couldn't enjoy the story. I really pushed myself to finish reading this and I don't know why I bothered because it was the worst ending a book could have. I will still give other books of this writer a go. A lot of people talk about humor in Liane Moriarty's books but everything irritated me, things that were supposed to be funny, they didn't feel funny to me rather it all felt too dreary and I kept rolling my eyes throughout. There was a lot of drama but it was all predictable and just didn't work for me. I did like the sisters' bonding.