The Wishing Game by Meg Shaffer

Amy  

fiction

Lucy grew up in a home with an ill sister and parents who devoted all their love and attention to the sister. Now 26 years old, she is estranged from them, living on the other end of the country, working as an elementary school teaching assistant, and hoping she’ll be able to adopt her favorite student to get him out of foster care. The problem is that she doesn’t have the money or stability in her living situation to be approved for fostering, let alone adoption. Just when she’s about to give up hope of being Christopher’s mother, her favorite childhood author, Jack, selects her to participate in a contest which might allow her to collect some serious money.

The Wishing Game is a cute story but I spent the first half feeling like it wasn’t really believable. Perhaps it was the sappy audiobook narration and I would’ve liked it better if I’d read the book instead. But I did really enjoy the second half. I think it redeemed itself in my mind when Meg Shaffer started providing some explanations for situations that hadn't seemed authentic in the first half.  

I don’t quite understand its third place achievement in the Goodreads Choice Awards for Fiction, beating one of my favorite books of 2023. I did enjoy the whimsy, the focus on books, and the many good intentions of some characters in the book. And I liked the resolutions. I just rolled my eyes a lot while listening to the audiobook.  The ending was surprisingly touching. I guess I didn’t realize how much I liked these characters until the end.

Rachel L. Jacobs narrated most of the novel and Paul Boehmer narrated the few sections that were from Jack’s children’s books. Jacobs was overly dramatic right off the bat which made the characters come across as insincere.  I mean, I don’t disagree with the feelings of sadness and frustration she was trying to impart. It’s that it was often over the top, especially before we fully understood Lucy’s back story. Jacobs did have a vocal repertoire of different voices, but did not have a great British accent. This was unfortunate because one of the main characters was British. Between the  accent and the fact that this was a male character, she tended to mumble and talk softer when voicing him so I often had difficulty understanding what this character was saying and had to "rewind" and turn up the volume in sections where he had a lot of dialogue. She gets a C+. As for Boehmer, he read the few short sections he narrated, which were snippets from a children’s book, like a news anchor—too formally. Interestingly, I had only known him from another series where he primarily spoke with European accents. His accents were so good that I hadn’t realized until now that he is American!  Too bad he wasn’t voicing the British character in this novel. For his work here, he gets a B-.  As a side note, it was odd that his name wasn’t even mentioned in the credits at the end of the audiobook. I recommend skipping the audiobook for this novel. Better choices could have been made and I think I’d have liked the book better without these particular narrators’ interpretations.