The Wishing Box by Dashka Slater

The Wishing Box Reviews

• 
  Karen

  A story of fate and free will and family dysfunction.
  
  It's quirky and captivating with strong touches of magical realism.
  
  The story and the characters are compelling, and they constantly surprise you.
  
  It is full of amazing imagery... almost like being at a movie.
  
  I would recommend this to someone in need of a light, refreshing read!
• 
  Meg

  3.5 stars...she had me until “flesh colored tail”
• 
  Lolly K Dandeneau

  This is a strange novel to be sure. It is told in many voices of women in one magical family. Magical in the ways of intuition and the awareness of seeing fates pattern. Some have compared this story to Alice Hoffman novels, and while I would see a similarity, I would not agree. I felt at times the author tried too hard with the whole magical path. Yet on that breath I must admit, I loved the strange moments. A human seductress with an animal tail? Out there, but definitely captured my imagination. I flip flop between like and love here. Some of the story just dragged, but other parts held meaning. This is a story for those of us that like quirky tales (tail ha ha). It tickled me but I kept wanting something from it that never delivered. Not heavy so much as Hoffman's stories are but a really good read all the same. Glad to have stumbled on this story, and look forward to more from the author.
• 
  Vanessa Perez

  I liked it enough -- I found myself enthralled by the details and the dialogue. I could compare this book to eating salsa even though you dislike cilantro but you're so hungry you grin and bear it. It was a good, good story, with likable characters who were all different. Now for the cilantro -- toward the middle of the book all these big words started getting thrown out, left and right, out of no where. And as quickly as they came on, they left. Also, there was a natural disaster in the book -- and maybe it's because I'm not familiar with Oakland, but why was everything but the highway unscathed? And why was everyone so nonchalant? Last piece of "cilantro" -- it started getting quite annoying when, in every other paragraph, 40+ readers had "highlighted" some "deep" phrase about fate or god. I'd recommend it, but not on a kindle otherwise it has the tendency to come off as cheesy. Oh and two vaginas? Really?
• 
  Dashka

  I'm biased of course -- after all, I wrote the book. But you can find some tools for drawing your own conclusions about the book -- named one of the year's best by the Los Angeles Times on my
  website. There you'll find
  reviews, a couple of
  excerpts, as well as a
  reader's guide and more. This book always engenders lots of debate and discussion, particularly among parents of young children, which makes it a great Book Club book.
• 
  Sarah Shoemaker

  This was a quick, surprisingly good read. Amazon was having a Kindle book sale and I got this one for $1. It had good (albeit few) reviews, so what the heck?
  
  I enjoyed the magical, quirky elements of the story. The characters were believable and everyone was pretty much happy in the end.
  
  Some quotes from the book that I liked:
  
  "Sometimes I think the fear of dying is really a fear that you're not living the life you want."
  
  "Fate is the choice that we make because we think there is no other."
  
  "Most people cry for themselves and their illusions more than they ever cry for others."
  
  One thing that I found odd: No mother that I've ever met would let her seven year old say "fat ass" even in jest.
• 
  Jillian

  A well-told story of fate and free will and family dysfunction, at the center of which stand a father and daughter who are "like two versions of the same letter, capital and lowercase. They didn't look alike, but they meant the same thing."
  
  It's quirky and captivating with strong touches of magical realism and apparently something for everyone: whoever owned the book before me carefully marked various quotes about fate and philosophy, whereas I was captivated by Slater's ability to turn a phrase or weave a metaphor.
• 
  Leora

  I read this book several years ago and loved it so much I immediately started lending it to everyone I knew. Of course, it eventually went out and never returned. I couldn't remember the author, and I wasn't sure about the title, so I am thrilled to have found it on goodreads! I can't wait to get a copy and read it again.
  
  The story and the characters are compelling, and they constantly surprise you. It is full of amazing imagery- I remember it like I would a movie. Even years later (and hundreds of books later) I have several clear images from this book in my mind.
  
  
• 
  Julia

  I got this book at the college where I work for 3 dollars, so I couldn't pass it up. I was really suprised. This was touching, funny, and the narrator's voice was very honest. I would reccomend this to someone in the need of a light, refreshing read!
• 
  Cynthia Sillitoe

  Strong first novel. The change from one narrator to another worked particularly well. Some scenes are so mystical and vivid. Others just cracked me up. And this one character, Justina....well, I'm not sure Alice Hoffman could have made that work so well.
• 
  Therese Walsh

  Beautifully written, funny and impossible to put down. The Wishing Box is one of those rare stories you don't want to see end.
• 
  Terri

  I really enjoyed this book. Magical story of overcoming.
• 
  Renee

  I found this book marginally interesting, but unpleasant and full of self-absorbed characters. Certainly, as humans we are all self-centered beings by nature, but nearly all of
  Dashka Slater's characters in
  The Wishing Box display this trait in the extreme. And I found it all a bit too much.
  
  Not a religious person in the conventional sense, I found the idea of locking a statue of the Virgin Mary in a box as a way of making wishes come true both alarming and repulsive. That should have been my first signal that this novel is not for me. But, I persisted out of sheer stubbornness, expecting that at least some of the characters would redeeem themselves, but it never happened for me. I never could understand what Julia and Lisa ever saw in their father, especially the washed-up version they met as adults. I was irritated that they did not appreciate the aunt who had raised them more. And, I was outraged by the way Julia abandoned her son.
  
  All in all, not a fun read at all.
• 
  Nana Lee

  I'm very disappointed with this book. I saw this in a local bookstore but I didn't buy it immediately because I checked the reviews on amazon first. This book has a 5 star reviews from 6 people. That alone made me go back to the bookstore again. I was reading half way through the book an yet nothing very important happend. I still gave the book a chance but until the end, I was confused. I felt that since this is the author's first, she want to tell so many stories and she incorporated them all in one book. I never felt the magic that Glamour is saying that the books possess. Maybe the author needs to explain this to me first so that I can fully understand what she's trying to convey. Waste of time and money. Hey wait, does this author has 6 amazon accounts? Maybe that could explain the 5 stars.
• 
  Cheryl

  I started this book with anticipation. I had just finished reading Stephen King's 'Carrie', and was looking forward to something less dark and disturbing. I should have kept looking.
  
  This book was SO difficult to get into. It was told from the perspective of many different women (all related), that I had trouble keeping them straight. Once I finally got the characters down pat, I found that I didn't like ANY of them. The only character that I liked was Steven...and my heart broke for him on every page.
  
  Bleck....if I wasn't the kind of person that HAS to finish a book once I start it, I would have stopped reading it after the first 50 pages.
• 
  Diane Lybbert

  Interesting story of family dynamics. Two adult sisters whose father left their mother and them when they were very young children decide to 'wish' him back by locking a statue of the Virgin Mary in a box until she grants their wish. Quirky family - free spirited mother, her sister who practices divination, their Mexican-Indian mother, and the two daughters, the younger more settled than the elder, both struggling with relationships. I really liked the characters, and enjoyed the story - no spoiler here!!
• 
  Stephanie

  Blah. I never connected with this book, yet at times I wanted to kick each character in this book in the shins. So, in all fairness, I probably connected at some level...but not enough to make it an enjoyable or memorable read.
• 
  Bronwyn

  I really enjoyed the warmth and the quirks of this book. The shift from one narrator to another was deftly handled, and the peccadilloes of each person were well drawn and believable. It is great to read a book that is so firmly of this world but is unafraid of elements of magic. Some moments went on too long, but by the last pages I didn't want to leave the family, messed up as it was. Maybe messy would be a better description!
• 
  Kelly

  I thought this book was interesting, and I liked the fantastical elements to it. It really is a character study of hugely flawed people more than anything else, so don't expect a lot of action. It was not a book that I had to keep running back to, but it was an interesting enough read and there were certainly lines and portions that made me think.
• 
  Laureen

  I thought the writing was poetic in a way but I found the lack of a plot difficult for me. I didn't know which direction the book was headed. The book seemed to skip genres too - sometimes it was drama, othertimes it was fantasy which also made it a challenge to keep up with where the book was headed and what story was actually being told.
• 
  Christal

  While I generally enjoyed this story, I did find the author's use of flowery writing to be over done to the point of it being distracting. I think a more thorough use of the editor's red pencil might have made this a more enjoyable read.
• 
  Debbie

  Desperately needed a book to read while on the beach yesterday and found this on my kindle app.
  
  Story too disjointed so didn't get to learn enough about any one character. Didn't really like the magical/ghost stuff either.
• 
  Jennifer

  I borrowed this one from Cassie's book shelf. Not a bad read, dysfunctional family, adorable kid, earthquakes...