What You Wish For
What You Wish For is a story full of heart. The characters are so real you will feel you know them. Katherine Center takes readers on an emotional journey. Then she brings them back home with tears of joy. In fact, finding joy in life is an integral part of this engaging story.
If you’re already a Katherine Center fan, you’re bound to love What You Wish For. Much like other novels written by this author, What You Wish For is a wonderful women’s book club selection. And I know this to be true because my women’s book club just loved How To Walk Away and Things You Save In A Fire, both written by Katherine Center.
The story involves a school librarian, Samantha “Sam,” who has “a thing” for Duncan a teacher at the same school. But Sam never acts on her feelings for Duncan. Sam has a neurological brain disorder which seems to be in remission. Yet, she fears falling in love would just bring heartache. Sam believes no one could want to stay with her due to her condition. Samantha wonders if she will ever find romance with someone who can truly love her just the way she is.
Eventually Sam, moves to Galveston, Texas and lands a teaching job in a seaside town. Sam shares her undeclared love for Duncan to her friend Alice. Alice is a math teacher and basically a “math-freak” Alice sympathizes with Sam, but I think Alice believes it’s mathematically possible for Sam to find love—and maybe even a happily ever-after. And if not with Duncan, then with someone else.
Katherine Center is a super-talent when it comes to writing about everyday people. While there are a few characters who could do with a personality makeover, they are there to serve up the drama—and they do that quite well.
Ms. Center brings us well-drawn characters, who try hard to rise to whatever challenges they face in life. And while these characters are basically just ordinary people like the rest of us, the author brings out the worst, as well as, the best in them. That doesn’t mean the characters are perfect little people. Rather, in spite of their ordinariness, they are intelligent, soulful and complex beings.
I won’t write any spoilers in this review. But I will say What You Wish for is chock full of feel-good things like: young school children, and teachers who love their school and care about their pupils. Katherine Center makes us feel her characters sadness and share in their giddy feelings of love and tenderness. But she also makes us feel angry and fearful of the dangers that face today’s school children and their teachers.
I mentioned that joy is an integral part of this story. Do the characters in What You Wish For achieve joyfulness? All I can say is that Ms. Center knows how to make her readers feel the ups and downs of the characters. But she is an expert is bringing us all back home. And isn’t that, after all, what we wish for? Oh, you see what I did there?
There is so much more I could say about What You Wish For. But instead, all I will say now is, if you have read and enjoyed other books written by Katherine Center, you will love What You Wish For.
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