The Summer my Wishes Came True

Radhika Sanghani is mining a very enjoyable seam of real-life stories with a magical twist, following The Girl Who Couldn’t Lie and How to get Magically Popular. Once again, she successfully uses this trope to get her characters to learn some thoughtful life lessons, the magic creating lovely moments of humour and pathos along the way. She also focuses very successfully on the tween age group, and this would make a lovely transition read towards the end of Year 6 or in Year 7, when children face the prospect of lots of new classmates and are quite likely to experience some of the issues Ayesha has to deal with. Ayesha has been desperate to go to summer camp with her best friend Nikki, who has been on holiday with her family for two weeks and worryingly has been strangely silent. When Nikki does arrive, she looks completely different and has also acquired a boyfriend. Nikki fits right in with the two cool girls in their cabin and Ayesha feels increasingly left out, particularly when they are all focusing on developing their ‘talents’ in the camp musical, which is the highly appropriate Mean Girls, and Ayesha’s ‘talent’ is identified as a mere support manager for the production. Then she accidentally overhears Nikki saying some very mean things about her to these new friends and, completely distraught, she heads to the lake shore as a full super moon rises. She wishes her life could be different and awakes an incredible power. She can make any wish come true, which often means being able to avoid unpleasant things like an early morning run or a cold shower or achieving things without effort like being able to sing and learn lines.  Camp life becomes everything she had dreamed of, although her relationship with Nikki is still not quite what it was. What more can she do?

This story is a wonderful demonstration of the old adage, ‘Be careful what you wish for’, because Ayesha gradually sees the wider impact that her wishes can have upon other people and has to consider if that is right. She also begins to see another side to Nikki, as well as learning a lot about herself. Her gradual realisation that they are no longer suited to each other and that perhaps the messiness of life is better than fake perfection is very well done. This is an insightful  and very relatable story about the challenges of friendship and self-discovery and about anxiety and striving to fit in and will  make  us all take a good look at how we treat others and how they in turn treat us.