One Two Three

From Laurie Frankel, the New York Times bestselling author of This Is How It Always Is, a Reese's Book Club x Hello Sunshine Book Pick, comes One Two Three, a timely, topical novel about love and family that will make you laugh and cry...and laugh again.

In a town where nothing ever changes, suddenly everything does...

Everyone knows everyone in the tiny town of Bourne, but the Mitchell triplets are especially beloved. Mirabel is the smartest person anyone knows, and no one doubts it just because she can’t speak. Monday is the town’s purveyor of books now that the library’s closed―tell her the book you think you want, and she’ll pull the one you actually do from the microwave or her sock drawer. Mab’s job is hardest of all: get good grades, get into college, get out of Bourne.

For a few weeks seventeen years ago, Bourne was national news when its water turned green. The girls have come of age watching their mother’s endless fight for justice. But just when it seems life might go on the same forever, the first moving truck anyone’s seen in years pulls up and unloads new residents and old secrets. Soon, the Mitchell sisters are taking on a system stacked against them and uncovering mysteries buried longer than they’ve been alive. Because it's hard to let go of the past when the past won't let go of you.

Three unforgettable narrators join together here to tell a spellbinding story with wit, wonder, and deep affection. As she did in This Is How It Always Is, Laurie Frankel has written a laugh-out-loud-on-one-page-grab-a-tissue-the-next novel, as only she can, about how expanding our notions of normal makes the world a better place for everyone and how when days are darkest, it’s our daughters who will save us all.

This discussion guide was shared and sponsored in partnership with Henry Holt.

Book club questions for One Two Three by Laurie Frankel

Use these discussion questions to guide your next book club meeting.

At the beginning of the novel, Mirabel says, “Teenage girls don’t get enough credit for this, their ability to see the potential import of everything, no matter how insignificant it seems, and analyze it endlessly. It’s written off—we’re written off—as silly, but it’s the opposite” (p. 7). Why do you think the author has chosen teenage girls to narrate? Why three of them?

Mab spends the novel determined to leave Bourne for somewhere better, which she thinks is anywhere. But Pooh says, “There’s a lot that’s really nice about this town. We’re not especially wonderful maybe, but we’re not especially miserable either. How it is here is how it is everywhere” (pp. 165–66). How usual or unusual is Bourne? In what ways has Bourne suffered, and in what ways does it actually seem like a pretty good place to live—for anyone and for its residents in particular? Regardless of where you’re brought up or what you have or don’t have, do you always think the grass is greener somewhere else? Did you when you were sixteen?

Monday has what she calls “witchlike librarian magic to pick the right book for you.” She says librarians “listen to what you need and want and think of a way to help you which sometimes is by ignoring what you need and want” (p. 40). Why does she go to such lengths to maintain the town library in her home? Why does the novel give Monday the job of librarian? What role do libraries and librarians play in communities like Bourne and in communities like your own?

At some point, nearly everyone in this novel tells Nora it’s time to move on from the legal battle she’s been waging for sixteen years. When Omar calls her “the town crazy lady,” she asks, in the face of all that’s happened, whether it’s “crazier to demand some kind of restitution, even though restitution is impossible, or to pretend all is well and everything’s fine when nothing is or will be ever again?” (p. 157). Does Nora’s commitment to the lawsuit seem foolhardy or necessary or something else altogether? What would be the most appropriate response to what’s happened to Bourne?

Nora’s lawyer, Russell Russo, appears in Bourne only online or in flashback, but his presence runs deep throughout the story. When his baby is born with Down syndrome (p. 180–81), many things change for him and his relationship with Nora, with Bourne, and with the lawsuit. What is the significance of Russell’s child having Down syndrome?

Mirabel says, “There are two kinds of people in this world. People who can expect to, strive to, feel entitled to be happy. And people who cannot….Look through history for the latter. Look around your town or city. You will find us everywhere….Some people are unhappy and that’s okay with us” (p. 147). Who cannot expect to be happy in this novel, and with whom is that okay? Is she right that there are people where you live of whom the same is true?

Zach says, “Only rich people get to stand on principle” (p. 228). Do you agree? What stops people in this book from doing what’s right or even what they believe is right? When do these characters have to compromise their principles and why?

Mab feels sorry for River because, unlike her and her sisters, he doesn’t seem loved or prioritized by his Mab feels sorry for River because, unlike her and her sisters, he doesn’t seem loved or prioritized by his parents (p. 235). Mirabel says, “It occurs to me for the first time: there are some ways, some crucial breathtaking, shattering ways, in which Nathan Templeton’s lot is far unluckier than mine” (p. 291). In what ways are the Mitchells in fact luckier than the Templetons?

Toward the end of the book, Mirabel expresses anger and frustration with everyone in Bourne, including and especially her mother. When Nora assures Mirabel she loves her exactly the way she is, Mirabel replies, “That is not enough” (p. 358). Why is accepting and loving people as they are not enough? What are Mirabel’s (or anyone’s) needs beyond being cared for and embraced by her mother, sisters, and community?

Two of the three sisters separately make the same catastrophic error in judgment towards the end of the book, and it costs them—and everyone—dearly. Why does each do it? How does each betray the other? Are they both equally forgivable and forgiven, or do you blame one more than the other?

Belsum Chemical and its CEO Duke Templeton are clearly the villains of this story, but, as Mab observes, the rest of the Templetons “are becoming less evil by the moment” (p. 309). How are River, Nathan, and Apple each responsible for and complicit in what’s happened and what’s happening in Bourne, and how are they each better than their parents? How does each try to redeem himself or herself by the end of the book? Do any of them succeed?

The novel opens with Mab’s homework assignment to write about how “history and memory are unreliable narrators, especially in Bourne” (p. 1). Mrs. Shriver reminds her of this toward the end. (p. 348). What do these words mean, and why are they especially true in Bourne? At the very end of the book, Mirabel says she will keep writing because “I have voice to give we voiceless few” (p. 397). How unreliable and how important are memory, history, storytelling, and witness in this novel?

One Two Three Book Club Questions PDF

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