How To Make A Wish by Ashley Herring Blake

How To Make A Wish by Ashley Herring Blake
Release Date -  May 2, 2017

Publisher Website - Raincoast
Publisher Social Media - Twitter
Pages -  336 pages
My Rating - 4/5
**received for an honest review**

Here is the Goodreads synopsis

Grace, tough and wise, has nearly given up on wishes, thanks to a childhood spent with her unpredictable, larger-than-life mother. But this summer, Grace meets Eva, a girl who believes in dreams, despite her own difficult circumstances.

 One fateful evening, Eva climbs through a window in Grace’s room, setting off a chain of stolen nights on the beach. When Eva tells Grace that she likes girls, Grace’s world opens up and she begins to believe in happiness again.    How to Make a Wish is an emotionally charged portrait of a mother and daughter’s relationship and a heartfelt story about two girls who find each other at the exact right time. 

How To Make A Wish's synopsis promises a love story between two girls who are dealing with difficult things at this point in their lives. It is also so much more than that.  Ashley Herring Blake delivers a novel that looks at the complexity of relationships, both healing and toxic, and the strength in accepting the reality of both.

I love when the main character and love interest each have story arcs outside of the romance. How To Make A Wish excels at this. Ashley Herring Blake has given each girl their own issues, and comple stories outside of falling in love. This, for me, made them seem even more nuanced and real. It made their story seem more fleshed out, and this allowed the characters to grow outside of the relationship so that the relationship could work. It made them better characters, and as this is a character driven novel, it made all the difference.

The romance in this is rather adorable. It contains a lot of my favourite things - secrets, inside jokes, well written kissing scenes, and characters who are actually good for each other. It was nice to read a love story between two girls where discovering their sexuality, or coming out was not the focus. Those stories are necessary and vital, but so are stories like this one. Stories that focus on relationships and the giddiness of falling in love. Stories in which both girls know who they are, even if one (or both) are still testing the language that feels comfortable to define themselves with. It showcases the need for different kinds of stories for all kinds of representation.

The adult characters that populate this story are both utilized and woven into the story arcs seamlessly. There are complex relationships shown between the teen characters and the adult characters. The complexity mostly comes from the adult characters being complex themselves. The adults in this novel are imperfect, but not vilified. They are shown to make mistakes, but that those mistakes are not all they are. These mistakes do not make them beyond redemption. There are examples of both healthy and unhealthy examples of parent/child like relationships within this novel, and none of them veer into cliche territory.

This story doesn't wrap itself up in a happily ever after bow at the end. That doesn't mean there isn't happy things at the end, but the themes of this story are such that a 'perfect' ending would have felt false. The ending we get feels true. Repairing ourselves, and relationships take time. It is a longer journey filled with stumbles and set backs. Ashley Herring Blake acknowledges this with this story, and it makes this story feel very realistic. It is both satisfying and hopeful, while remaining true to the story being told. Those, in my opinion, are the best kind of endings.

If you're looking for a summer read that is a romance, but with something extra, I recommend picking this one up. I am looking forward to reading whatever Ashley Herring Blake writes next as she's proven herself to be an author to follow in the young adult contemporary genre.