The Oppenheimer triplets despise one another, for reasons
that I never understood. Their family is
extremely wealthy, but true affection is in short supply. In fact, Sally and Lewyn both decide to
attend their father’s alma mater, Cornell, but they both refuse to acknowledge
to anyone that they have a sibling on campus.
The third triplet is Harrison, a know-it-all who opts for a very
untraditional two-year school for men before his eventual matriculation at
Harvard. As these three flee the nest,
their mother discovers her husband’s infidelity and uses it as leverage to get
him to agree to having another child.
This one will be carried by a surrogate, but all four children were
conceived in vitro at the same time. The
fourth child, Phoebe, is the most normal, despite being raised solely by her
mother, who has basically checked out emotionally. This family is a walking billboard for the
adage that money doesn’t buy happiness. This
book, for me, was something of a chore until about halfway through, when all
hell breaks loose, due to a dirty deed by Sally that, of course, backfires. The
triplets are the epitome of unlikeable characters at this point, but their
three-way train-wreck of a quarrel on their 19
th birthday is the
sort of disaster that we can’t help watching.
The author juggles the myriad family secrets quite deftly so that we are
much better informed than the characters themselves. It’s like being a fly on the wall in anticipation
of the inevitable brawl. The author does
hide one shocker from us until the very end, but I didn’t think this revelation
was nearly as big a deal as the other happenings she meted out that caused me
to gasp.
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