I’ve often wished that I would win the lottery. It hasn’t happened yet.
Could that be because I didn’t make my wish while blowing away the fluff from a dandelion, dropping a coin in a wishing well, pulling on one wing of a wishbone, or rubbing a magic lamp, spotting a falling star, or finding a four-leaf clover?
Or could it be because I never get around to buying a lottery ticket?
Folktales from many cultures around the world address the topic of wishes and how to make them come true. Many of them leave unanswered the tantalizing question of whether a wish came true because a special ritual was performed when it was made.
Wishes are also the subject of serious academic research, specifically in the field of “sentiment analysis,” where wishes are known as a genre of “subjective expression.” (You can see why serious academic researchers should never be asked to write folktales. Can you imagine a genie offering Aladdin “three opportunities for subjective expression”?)
Some researchers have developed strategies for helping people fulfill their wishes. One of these is called WOOP, which stands for Wish Outcome Obstacle Plan. The website about WOOP, woopmylife.org/en/home, states that it is “usually examined under the scientific term Mental Contrasting with Implementation Intentions.” (Academic researchers should definitely stay out of the folktale-writing business!)
One wish researcher, Gabriele Oettingen has said, “If you see something in the world that you want, something that is challenging yet feasible because you have some agency over it, WOOP gives you a framework for turning your positive fantasies into reality.” I think than Antoine de Saint-Exupéry summed it up more succinctly in The Little Prince, when he wrote, “A goal without a plan is just a wish.”
Wishes are as popular in contemporary children’s literature as they are in old folktales. A character struggling to make a wish come true in the face of massive obstacles — what a great plot-starter! I think the best of the stories leave unanswered the question of whether magic was involved in the wish fulfillment.
The books described below are some of my favorite children’s books about wishes.
Katerina’s Wish
By Jeannie Mobley
Katerina Prochazkova doesn’t believe in wishes. A year after her family immigrated from Bohemia with dreams of owning their own farm in America, they are still living in a mining camp in Colorado, where her father risks his life each day in a coal mine and the family falls deeper into debt each week. Katerina, known as Trina to family and friends, no longer believes in dreams or wishes coming true.
Then Trina has a strange encounter with a large fish in a nearby creek. Shortly after that, a neighbor tells Trina and her sisters a story from the old country about a magic carp that could grant three wishes. One of her sisters says she would wish for plum dumplings, the other for hair ribbons. When asked what her wish would be, Trina insists that “there’s no such thing as wishes.” When pressed, she says bitterly that she would wish to be back in Bohemia. Her father says that he would promptly cancel her wish with his wish to be on a farm in America.
Trina is flabbergasted when her sisters’ wishes come true within a few days. Try as she might, she can’t stop wondering if the fish she saw was a magic carp. She decides to use the remaining of the three wishes to make her father’s dream come true. She wishes for a farm where her family can be happy. In the meantime, she very cleverly catches fish and trades them for chickens to provide eggs for her family and for seeds to plant a garden. She outwits the manager of the company store, who overcharges the mill families, and finds ways to buy goods at better prices.
By the book’s end, the future is looking much brighter for Trina and her family. Was this because a magic carp granted Trina’s wish, or was it because of Trina’s determination and ingenuity? I still don’t know.
Katerina’s Wish is superb historical fiction. In addition to well-developed characters and an action-packed storyline, it is rich in details about life in a coal mining town in 1901. It also presents a clear picture of what immigrants to the United States experienced in the early twentieth century — prejudice and exploitation, but also hope and opportunity.
You can learn more about Jeannie Mobley here.
Wish
By Barbara O’Connor
Charlie Reese — real name Charlemagne, but that’s “a dumb name for a girl” — has a list of all the ways to make a wish: seeing a white horse, blowing a dandelion, looking at a clock at exactly 11:11, finding a penny. She hasn’t missed a single day of making her wish since the fourth grade. What is her wish? She can’t tell you that because then it won’t come true.
Charlie’s focus on wishes is understandable. Her daddy, Scrappy, is in jail. Her mother stays in bed all day with the curtains drawn. Her older sister gets to live with a friend in Raleigh, North Carolina, until she finishes high school, but a social worker has decided that Charlie needs “a stable family environment,” and Charlie has been sent across the state to live with an aunt and uncle she doesn’t know.
Charlie is not happy to be living with a bunch of “squirrel-eating hillbillies,” and she makes this known by sulking, being rude in response to kindness, and even kicking a classmate on her very first day at school. She is baffled when her behavior is met with kindness and understanding by her aunt, her uncle, her new best friend, and her friend’s family.
The turning point in Charlie’s life is when she spots a stray dog and decides to make it her own. She showers the dog with the love that has been missing in her own life and inadvertently opens herself to the love that now surrounds her. She eventually discovers that wishes do come true, but not always in the way you expected.
On the surface, Wish seems to be filled with eccentric characters and comical anecdotes, but Charlie’s observations are keen and insightful, and they give the story depth. It’s perfect for young readers who come for a story about a dog and end up discovering important ideas about family and community.
You can learn more about Barbara O’Connor here.
A Drop of Hope
By Keith Calabrese
It’s nearly impossible to summarize A Drop of Hope. It involves a deathbed promise, an abandoned wishing well, and a pile of toys in an attic, plus several dozen characters and a series of what might be coincidences or might be magic.
As Ernest Wilmette’s grandfather was dying, he made Ernest promise to clean out his attic. In the attic, Ernest finds a pile of toys, all obviously from long ago but still in their original packaging. He feels as though he is being guided toward a deluxe art set, and he takes it with him. A few days later, Ernest — short, skinny, meek, mild Ernest — stands up to the school’s most notorious bully in defense of another student. He is rescued from what could have been a fatal error by Ryan, who acts tough and cynical but has a heart of gold.
While escaping the bully, the two of them accidentally find themselves at the bottom of an old wishing well. While at the bottom of the well, they hear several classmates making wishes. Soon after, the art set from the attic ends up in the hands of the bully, and this triggers a series of events that seem to be making wishes come true.
Ernest is convinced that the wishing well is working magic and that the magic involves the old toys in his grandfather’s attic. He enlists Ryan and a new friend, Lizzy, in his plan to grant more wishes by using the toys from the attic. Ryan and Lizzy are skeptical at first, but they eventually become believers.
The plot also involves a famous jewel heist, a chance meeting on an airplane, a search for Bigfoot, an inscription on the back of an old photograph, and — well, trust me, there are dozens of subplots in this novel, and they all fit together neatly in a conclusion that satisfies. The story is told from multiple viewpoints, but each character is fully developed and eclectic enough to keep the multiple storylines distinct. Author Keith Calabrese manages to show the fundamental goodness of each character (except for the ruthless, scheming reporter who tries to manipulate the story of the wishing well to boost her ratings).
I think that Ryan best sums up the underlying message of A Drop of Hope: “You can’t fix the world. But you do your best in your own little corner of it. And you hope.”
You can learn more about Keith Calabrese here.
My wish, of course, is that you will enjoy reading these books. I also wish that all your subjective expressions will come true.
Thanks to blickpixel at pixabay.com for the featured image above.