How to Make a Wish by Ashley Herring Blake

Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement. Ivy’s story is no mere niche-filler in LGBTQ middle-grade realism-it’s a standard-setter. Most characters are assumed white the black lesbian who owns the inn where the Aberdeens stay after the storm and who steps in as a surrogate mother while Ivy’s own is occupied with insurance and a sick baby, is engaged to a brown-skinned Latina. The tornado scene is filled with breathtaking urgency as Ivy and her family run for safety, and the descriptions of Ivy’s contradictory and confusing feelings capture the heartbreaking difficulty of a non-normative early adolescence filled with questions of identity and belonging. The mystery person encourages Ivy to come out, but whom can she trust? Is she even ready? Blake’s ( Suffer Love, 2016) first middle-grade novel is characterized by rich, descriptive prose. When her drawings begin turning up in her school locker, Ivy’s biggest fear comes true: someone knows her secret. The images are telling there can be no doubt that the white girl with the “coiling mane” of wild strawberry-blonde hair is 12-year-old Ivy or that she’s holding hands with a dark-haired white girl in every picture. Twelve-year-old Ivy Aberdeen finds comfort in drawing she keeps a private sketchbook the way other kids her age keep written diaries.Īfter a tornado destroys her home, her notebook, filled with things Ivy isn’t ready to talk about or trust with anyone, goes missing, and she feels the last bit of her world drop out from under her.

How to Make a Wish by Ashley Herring Blake