With a decidedly close parallel to 20th Century Fox’s 1954 movie Three Coins in a Fountain, author Kimberly Sullivan’s novel THREE COINS follows the lives of three American women living in Rome. Each woman has a history of disappointing relationships with men. Each wonders if she will ever find true love. Sullivan does an exemplary job describing the Italian landscape, customs, and people throughout the story.
Emma wants to return to the workplace after being a full-time homemaker and mother while she was married. Now divorced, she is raising two sons and a daughter on her own because her well-known, plastic surgeon ex-husband is too busy to help between his building a swanky client base and spending time with his latest bimbo love interest. Her teenage children are busy with school and extracurricular activities, leaving Emma alone and bored. Tiffany is a young, sexy showgirl want-to-be who teaches dance to pay the bills but longs to be an Italian television personality. She’ll do whatever it takes to break into the spotlight but finds that the men who could make a difference in her career are more interested in her looks than her skills and abilities. Annarita teaches English as a second language to a variety of private students but would rather be using her cooking prowess to earn a living. Annarita’s last relationship ended when she caught her boyfriend with another woman.
The three women form an immediate friendship after meeting for the first time at a hotel in Sperlonga where they are enjoying a hiatus from their daily lives. They commiserate with each other about their dispiriting experiences with past relationships, support each other’s intentions, and help one other discover different paths for themselves. The plot line of the Three Coins in a Fountain film is referenced throughout Sullivan’s book, and the three women in her book often compare themselves to the three women in the film. But while the somewhat schmaltzy story line for Three Coins in a Fountain may have been fitting for the 1950s, it seems outdated for current times in THREE COINS. A more modern version of the story might appeal to a broader audience of today’s readers and smoother scene transitions are needed in several places to create a more logical flow in the narrative and orient readers better..
Kimberly Sullivan’s THREE COINS is beautifully written and edited and the people, landscape, and culture of Italy come alive in this tale of three American women in Rome who become fast friends after coming off of bad relationships.
~Florence Osmund for IndieReader