Synopses & Reviews
A sometimes funny, sometimes magical first novel, The Wishing Box explores the surprising and unintended consequences of getting what you ask for. Julia, an almost-30 single mom whose life is mostly together, lives in Oakland with her seven-year-old son. Never suspecting it will actually work, she and her sister create a wishing box and half-seriously hold a ceremony for the return of the father who abandoned them as children. Astonishingly, he comes backbut Julia's life has already moved abruptly in a new direction, and she has taken off in much the same way her father had many years before. Julia and her unusual family are at the heart of this novel about appearances and disappearances, the desire to control the future and explain the past, and the legacies passed on from one generation to another.
Review
Reviews from: Publishers Weekly
Los Angeles Times
Slater's enchanting debut puts magic-realist devices to good use as it uncovers a complex family history. The interwoven narratives start in 1989, in Oakland, where 29-year-old single mother Julia Harris lives with her two young children; her downbeat sister, Lisa; and their clairvoyant, half-Mexican aunt, Simone. Julia and Simone narrate alternating chapters, with Simon's sister, Carolina, adding her voice. Simone's segments are always clear and sometimes poetic, while Julia's grow winningly self-aware. Simone's difficult cross-cultural childhood gives the narrative yet more depth, and her special powers furnish a potent narrative device. Since she can sometimes see the future or the past, her psychic abilities fill in missing links in Slater's cleanly assembled and moving "story after the story after the story."
Two daughters, now in their 30s, abandoned at 5 and 7 by their father, use a spell prescribed by their maiden Aunt Simone: Put a statue of the Virgin Mary in a box and make a wish. They wish for their father, silly girls, "him or his personal effects, whichever would be less disgusting to look at." There is so much magic in fiction these days. Sometimes it is treacly; sometimes it pulls the humanity from the characters, making them prophesying angels, not people; sometimes it flummoxes the grammar when liberties are taken with language that are showy or hysterical. Dashka Slater negotiates these pitfalls with her good ear for dialogue and her allegiance to personality. She tells the story of four generations, a genealogy that sometimes blends in the centrifuge of the present; flattening the character like tracing paper as their stories overlap. But Aunt Simone is an invaluable Beatrice. "Sometimes," she admits, "second sight is like a song you can't get out of your head, a sad, plaintive song in the case." It's an impish novel, a San Franciscan novel, hopeful and full of humor.
Synopsis
This "funny, magical debut" Glamour explores the surprising and unintended consequences of getting what you wish for. Julia, an almost-30 single mom whose life is mostly together, lives in Oakland with her young son. When she and her sister half-seriously build a wishing box for the return of their long-absent father-and suddenly he comes back-life spins unpredictably out of control. Now Julia has disappeared, and she and her quirky family of seers and seekers find new ways to puzzle out the strange pulls of fortune and fate.
About the Author
Dashka Slater is a writer whose poetry and nonfiction have appeared in a variety of magazines and journals. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she is a reporter for The East Bay Express. This is her first novel.