Illustrations and short passages portray thirty-three individual men, women, and children whose wishes range from simply wanting never to blush to imagined feats of heroism.
I Wish
desires
Osvaldo The Snail
Osvaldo was a snail who had lived his whole life in the shadows of the darkest jungle. Perhaps that was why he had such a strong desire to visit the world of light. Together with his companion– Juanit, the ladybug– Osvaldo sets out to find the world of light.
How to Catch a Star
Eager to have a star of his own, a boy devises imaginative ways of catching one.
Stealing Buddha’s Dinner
As a Vietnamese girl coming of age in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Nguyen is filled with a rapacious hunger for American identity, and in the pre-PC-era Midwest (where the Jennifers and Tiffanys reign supreme), the desire to belong transmutes into a passion for American food. More exotic- seeming than her Buddhist grandmother’s traditional specialties, the campy, preservative-filled “delicacies” of mainstream America capture her imagination. In Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, the glossy branded allure of Pringles, Kit Kats and Toll House Cookies becomes an ingenious metaphor for Nguyen’s struggle to become a “real” American, a distinction that brings with it the dream of the perfect school lunch, burgers and Jell- O for dinner, and a visit from the Kool-Aid man. Vivid and viscerally powerful, this remarkable memoir about growing up in the 1980s introduces an original new literary voice and an entirely new spin on the classic assimilation story.
Healing Water: A Hawaiian Story
When thirteen-year-old Pia is sent to Hawaii’s leprosy settlement on Molokai Island in the 1860s, he chooses anger and self-reliance as his means of survival, but the faithful example of other villagers and one remarkable priest threaten to destroy his desire for revenge.
Featured in Volume I, Issue 3 of WOW Review.