How to Make a Wish by Ashley Herring Blake

Grace’s mother is unstable. After Grace’s dad died, when she was two years old, her mother, Maggie, has gone through a series of boy friends, they’ve moved numerous times, she drinks heavily and ‘borrows’ money from whoever she is living with. When Grace returns to Cape Katie after two weeks at a music workshop in Boston, she finds Maggie has (1) moved in with Pete, the lighthouse keeper, (2) Pete’s son and her new housemate is Julian, Grace’s ex-boyfriend who posted their sextexts on Tumblr after their breakup and (3) her mother has sold her piano…the one Grace is supposed to practice on for her upcoming audition for music school.

After storming out of the house, Grace walks to the beach for some solitude. Instead she finds a girl sitting by the water, shoulders heaving as if she’s crying. Unsure whether to skirt around her and leave her in peace or make sure she’s OK, Grace takes the latter course and meets Eva for the first time.

Eva, as it turns out, is living with Grace’s best friend Luca and his mother, Emmy. Eva is the daughter of Emmy’s best friend who recently died and Emmy is Eva’s guardian. Luca and Emmy are also Grace’s solid ground in the midst of her familial storms.

How to Make a Wish by Ashley Herring Blake, tackles a few serious issues, including what is a teenage daughter’s responsibility for her mother’s erratic behavior, who comes first, a daughter’s future or a mother’s present, and can a girl brought up in an unstable environment know how to truly love someone?

Blake does a great job of contrasting Luca’s happy family with Grace’s messed up one. She makes the budding relationship between Eva and Grace very realistic, with all the pitfalls and uncertainties inherent in a new relationship. She describes Grace’s dreams of being a concert pianist and the heartbreak when she thinks she may never achieve her goal. And Grace’s ambivalence about staying with her mother or leaving her is heartbreaking.

An all around good book!

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Wild Awake by Hilary T. Smith

Kiri is spending July alone at home while her parents are on a month long anniversary cruise. Her older brother is away at school. She is supposed to be practicing piano non-stop for a competition she’s entered. But one call upsets all of her plans.

The call is from Doug Fieldgrass and he slurs “Lissen, I ain’t going to call again. You want her stuff (Kiri’s older sister Sukey who supposedly died in a car accident when Kiri was 10), you get yourself down here and take it.”

Kiri is perplexed. She idolized her artist sister. She also knew that Sukey and her parents were at odds and Sukey was thrown out of the house. But no one ever speaks of Sukey. Kiri decides to track down Doug and find out what happened.

Along the way she befriends Skunk, a guy a few years older, with his own problems.

Wild Awake, Hilary T. Smith’s debut novel, is certainly an interesting read. However, I found the beginning slow going and by the end I just wanted to find out what happened, so I guess a little more editing might have been a good thing. Also, if it’s meant to be realistic fiction, there were some parts in which you have to suspend your belief and rely on imagination.

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Chopsticks by Jessica Anthony and Rodrigo Corral

Chopsticks by Jessica Anthony and Rodrigo Corral is described as a novel. But it’s a novel with few words and lots of pictures and it’s the pictures that tell the story leading up to the disappearance of child piano prodigy Gloria “Glory” Fleming from the Golden Hands Rest Facility for burned out (my words) child pianists whose parents push too hard. The pictures tell the story of Glory’s relationship with her new next door neighbor Francisco Mendoza.

If this was merely the story of Glory’s disappearance, there’d be no story. However, there’s more than meets the eye…actually, if you have a good eye and study the photos, you’ll uncover some things that make you wonder. And a book that makes you think and wonder is good.

Anthony and Corral’s novel approach (no pun intended) would probably be better in the interactive, multimedia electronic version which was supposed to be issued simultaneously with the print version, in that there are links to YouTube videos that obviously I couldn’t access as I read. I tried getting the videos by going directly to the URLs shown in the book without any luck.

So, in the words of Rod Stewart, Every Picture Tells a Story, Don’t It? And in this case, the combination of a novelist and an artist has come out with a unique creation worth exploring.

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