When Wishes Were Horses
by Cynthia Voigt
Intermediate    Greenwillow    224 pp.
8/24    9780062996923    $18.99
e-book ed.  9780062996947    $9.99

Magic-wish stories, in folklore and fiction, are perfect vehicles for exploring unintended consequences. Voigt takes full advantage of this narrative device in a compilation of, essentially, four novellas featuring middle-grade children who are each given a pair of wishes. Bug wishes for a skateboard. Zoe wishes her parents would stop having “Ugly Fights.” Casey wishes for a dog. Billy wishes for a unicorn. The upshot of these wishes includes alienation from friends, a parental separation, a threat to a tenuous living situation, and a sobering realization about the misuse of power in relationships. In each case, the first wish is the mess-up wish and the second is the tidy-up wish. In working out these dilemmas toward plausible happy endings, Voigt treads a skillful line between magic and concrete human realities, between getting what you want and discovering what you value—all with convincing, flawed characters, child and adult, in a variety of family situations. The narrative voice, complete with direct address to the reader, is ever-present here, and the moral lessons learned—honesty, compassion, generosity, humility, grit—are made explicit in a way appropriate for fable, which is really the storytelling territory these tales inhabit.

From the ">November/December 2024 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.