What You Wish For: A Book for Darfur (review)

If there is one thing that unites human beings across cultures, history and circumstance, it's the persistent desire that things might be other than the way they are. We wish for things we don't have, we wish our lives and bodies were different, we wish that others might notice us, we wish to be left alone, we wish that certain things would never change. In this richly varied collection centered on the theme of wishing, eighteen widely known writers, from Meg Cabot to John Green to Francisco X. Stork, share fresh and insightful stories, almost all published here for the first time, of wishes and their consequences. Most offer hope through wishes realized, but some settle for the act of wishing itself, the humor of wishes gone awry, or a warning to indeed be careful what one wishes for. There are refashioned fairy tales, light-hearted sibling, friend, and crush dramas, a graphic short about the wishes our ancestors made for us and helped us realize, several poems, and an open-ended concluding story by Joyce Carol Oates that resists easy interpretation. Settings range from the nineteenth-century cities of Andersen's "Little Match Girl" and the Grimms' "Aschenputtel" to more contemporary urban, suburban, and rural environs to futuristic cityscapes, with main characters of multiple ethnicities. The book opens with a moving forward by Mia Farrow about her experiences with a boy from a refugee camp in Darfur and ends with an explanatory note from the co-founder of the Book Wish Foundation, the charity organized to establish libraries in Darfuri refugee camps that will receive proceeds from this volume. With high-quality stories that appeal to varied tastes, this is a great collection to have on hand in the classroom for spare moments of reading alone or aloud to spur reflection and discussion, as well as to awaken students to the ways in which wishing might lead to doing good where it's most needed.