Book Review: The Wishing Game by Meg Shaffer
Wishes, magic, and children’s books that changed lives, check out my review for The Wishing Game below!
Book Information
Lucy wants nothing more than to be Christopher’s mother. But without stable income and living arrangements, she has no hope to qualify to foster him. The thing is, she knows how Christopher feels. She knows what it’s like to want a family who loves you more than anything. Her own family never loved her, so she found solace in reading books by her favorite author. So, when she gets invited by that author to compete for the only copy of his last book, she knows this is her chance to finally get enough money to foster to adopt Christopher. What she doesn’t realize, though, is how much she’ll have to take to win.
Review | Heidi Dischler
I guess this is just my year. I keep finding SO many good novels and it feels like I’m on a winning streak for reading. The Wishing Game is honestly like my dream novel. A competition. A writer. A found family. A whole lot of love (and I’m not just talking about romance). This is the type of book that grabs your heart and never lets go. You never want it to let go either.
This book is magical. Not in the Harry Potter sense, but real world magic where it’s the heart of humanity that makes you believe. I think people have the capability to produce magic, and this book makes me believe it even more. With Lucy trying so hard to adopt Christopher and give him the home he never had, you can truly start to feel the genuine goodness in this novel. I loved Jack. I loved Lucy. I loved Christopher. Everything about this book captured my heart.
The plot was super great and mainly followed Lucy and Christopher, but you still saw in other characters’ head (third person open point of view for those of you wondering). You followed a pretty linear set up besides a few flashbacks and stories of the past, but each of those progressed the novel rather than being a pointless flashback. The ending could’ve been guessed not because it was obvious, but because the author dropped hints throughout the novel.
When you look at all of the characters, I’m truly amazed at how much thought had to go into them. Meg Shaffer did so much work to make each of these characters feel real and it blows my mind thinking about the time she spent on them. Not only that, but the amount of time she spent building up the Clock Island book series. Like holy crap. If you’ve never written, you wouldn’t know how much time and effort this takes, but man does this take a lot of both. I admire her for that.
Overall, I’m absolutely in love with this book. If you look at other reviews, you’ll see that everyone else is in love with it too. If you want a book about real, true magic that leaves you feeling loved, warm, and completely uplifted, this book is for you.
Source: Personal Copy
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