Wish

By Barbara O’Connor

Hi! Does your family argue a lot and you feel like you’re never together? Well, Charlie does. Her family’s always arguing and she has a hot-headed temper like her dad. And her mom always yells at Charlie when she does something wrong. She inherited her dad, Scrappy’s temper. And Scrappy was being corrected. (“Corrected” means going to jail.) And her mom would not get out of the bed. So she was sent to live with her mother’s sister, Bertha. And Bertha was really nice. She tried to make her feel right at home as soon as she came in. Charlie kept making bad grades at school, but Bertha always found a way to see the light of things.

On her first day, she met a boy named Howard. Howard was assigned to be her backpack buddy. And Howard had a disease – one leg was shorter than the other, and kids made fun of him for it. So Charlie tried to be a good friend to Howard, but sometimes it was hard with his disease. Another thing you should know about Charlie is that she believed in wishes. Every day since she was at home, she would make a wish. She kept wishing for the same wish over and over again because it was the one thing that she desperately wanted.

And so Charlie had some anger issues. She would scream at Bertha and her husband, Gus, and she never obeyed in class. One day, she saw a little black dog and a little brown dog in a fight. The brown dog is the one who started the fight, but he was almost beat so he ran away. The next day, Charlie made plans with Howard to catch the dog. Every day she tried and ended up failing. But one day she caught the dog. She loved the dog and she named it Wishbone.

Wishbone learned to love Charlie, too. But one day he ran away. Her friendship with Howard was not going very well. Just the other day she had said something mean about him.

What will happen next? Will she find Wishbone? Will everything be okay at school? Will her friendship with Howard continue? As I always say, read the book to find out!

I recommend this book to readers who like exciting stories with lots of detail and a story that grabs you right from the start. This was an amazing book and I really think that anybody would like it.

A few helpful things I like to say about the books I read:

“Run and Get Mom” (how I describe the scariness factor):
Zero. None. Nada.

“Yucky-Lovey Stuff” (how I describe the romance factor):
Zero. None. Nada. (Unless you count hugging a dog.)