Wish

By Barbara O’Connor

MacMillan Publishing Group, 2016.

Grades 4-7

This was a lovely story. Charlie Reese and her older sister live with her mom while dad is prison. Mom is not mentally healthy from the descriptions that Charlie gives. All indications are that she is bipolar. A lot of lows where she can’t get of bed, go to work or care for her girls to manic highs. Social services steps in,when Charlie repeatedly gets in fights at school and finds that she is neglected at home. Charlie is shipped off to live with an Aunt (her mom’s sister) Bertha and Uncle Gus that she has never met while her sister, just a couple of months shy of graduation, gets to stay with a friend in town.

Charlie is very angry that she has been shipped off to live with “hillbilly” relatives while her sister remains behind. Bertha and Gus never had children, are really kind and accepting of Charlie but she really doesn’t know how to act so she continues to finds ways to make her daily wishes and be most disagreeable. She has made the same wish for the last ten years.–without fail. She knows if she misses a day her wish will never come true. So she looks for a shooting star, or a lost penny, a four leaf clover just to make sure she will someday get her wish.

Charlie is angry with the world and then enters Howard who gets made of fun in school of the time because of his limp and a stray dog that keeps coming around the house. As Howard and Charlie find ways to capture that dog something happens to Charlie–self discovery. Through true friendship, real family love and the unconditional love of the captive stray, now named Wishbone, Charlie starts to make a new wish. A very heartwarming story that you won’t want to miss.