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All seventeen year-old Grace Glasser wants is her own life. A normal life in which she sleeps in the same bed for longer than three months and doesn't have to scrounge for spare change to make sure the electric bill is paid. Emotionally trapped by her unreliable mother, Maggie, and the tiny cape on which she lives, she focuses on her best friend, her upcoming audition for a top music school in New York, and surviving Maggie’s latest boyfriend—who happens to be Grace’s own ex-boyfriend’s father. Her attempts to lay low until she graduates are disrupted when she meets Eva, a girl with her own share of ghosts she’s trying to outrun. Grief-stricken and lonely, Eva pulls Grace into midnight adventures and feelings Grace never planned on. When Eva tells Grace she likes girls, both of their worlds open up. But, united by loss, Eva also shares a connection with Maggie. As Grace's mother spirals downward, both girls must figure out how to love and how to move on.
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0For a long time, when I was a little younger, I thought that was how every girl saw other girls - this mix between beauty and awe and curiosity, a thin layer of lust just underneath.
trigger warnings: alcoholism, emotional abuse, neglect
Sweet lord, this book utterly struck something within me.
How to Make a Wish follows Grace Glasser, a seventeen year old girl who's never really seemed to have anything permanent apart from her best friend and her love for music. After moving into yet another house with yet another of her mum's less than permanent boyfriends, Grace meets Eva, a biracial girl consumed by grief from the recent death of her mother.
Eva likes girls, always has and always will, and her frankness about it stirs up buried thoughts she's never really had the chance to fully explore. As Eva starts to become a bigger and bigger part of Grace's life, she also becomes a bigger part of her problems, which leads to heavy consequences for everyone involved.
A love story between a lesbian and a bisexual girl with an unexpected happy ending: sign me up.
How to Make a Wish is both heartbreaking and heart making (I know that's not a real thing but).
It's a sweet love story with massive undertones of mental illness from all three of the main females. It's realistic and raw and it made me feel things.
The severe power and responsibility imbalance between Grace and Maggie haunted me a little after I read this. I've been Grace. I've been the girl who had to grow up too quickly, and be the parent to the parent. I related too much to having a parent who seems wonderful on the surface, but is completely different and full of problems in private. I am Grace and that's why I loved this book.
The thing is, I also felt some sympathy for Maggie, and that's just a testament to how good Ashley Herring Blake's writing is. Maggie has ruined parts of Grace's life, has neglected her, but yet I feel almost as sorry for her as I do for Grace.
It's not often I read something I identify with so completely, but that's what this book was for me. Because of that it'll always be special.
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