As You Wish

As You Wish
by Chelsea Sedoti
Recommended Ages: 14+

The Mojave desert town of Madison, Nevada, has a secret that explains everything weird about it. When we first meet good-looking athlete Eldon Wilkes, he is a month shy of his 18th birthday and his job, pumping gas at one of the few surviving full-service filling stations in the U.S., is really all about drawing visitors' attention away from that weirdness, and directing it toward the next town up the Extraterrestrial Highway, where they have Area 51 and whatnot. Personally, Eldon isn't all that excited about his upcoming birthday, which is to say his wish day. You see, every Madison native gets to make a wish on his or her 18th birthday, and provided they observe a few easily remembered rules, their wish always comes true.

Then they just have to live with the consequences. That's what Eldon is afraid of. He is all too aware that his dad wished to be the best football player in town, only to suffer a career-ending knee injury a month later. He has observed the unhappiness that resulted from his mom's wish – that her adolescent crush, Eldon's dad, would love her and her only for the rest of his life. As for the kid who ran over Eldon's little sister in the rush to make his wish – and then, by failing to wish to heal her, left her brain dead to this day – well, that kid's name is mud. Eldon knows his mom wants him to wish for money because it's her last hope to save Ebba, and he fears she'll never forgive him for not doing so.

Desperate to figure out what he wants to wish for, or even whether he wishes to wish at all, Eldon sets out on a quest to study how other people's wishes turned out. What he learns ends up reflecting mostly on how disappointing he is, not only to his parents but to his best friend, a couple of girls at his school, and pretty much everybody around him. Even as a narrator (except for a few third-person chapters reporting what he learned from other Madison residents about what they wished for), he doesn't sell himself as an altogether admirable or sympathetic guy. It makes the decision whether to root for him a complex one. But that doesn't stop his experience, and his final decision, from being exciting and emotionally powerful on multiple levels.

I spent a good part of this book silently predicting what Eldon's wish was going to be, but my guess wasn't quite on the mark. I can't say for certain whether I agree with his actual choice. By leaving that debate open, this book proves even more interesting in the end. Meantime, it touches on a variety of ethical issues, such as loyalty, gratitude, sexuality, suicide, and the pros and cons having what you want given to you versus earning it for yourself. I think readers on both the left and the right, politically, will find pages in this book that affirm their views and pages that challenge them. I think that's rather interesting, too.

This is Chelsea Sedoti's second novel for teens, following The Hundred Lies of Lizzie Lovett. She hails from my native city, Las Vegas, Nev., which puts her in a good position to write fiction set in one of the strangest and loneliest landscapes in the country. That loneliness (alongside the strangeness) is another theme that leaves its mark on this book. I'm interested in seeing what else she's got.