“Well, it’s just that it’s impossible to be a broken or whole person. You can only be a person. You can only exist, you can only belong to yourself, and you can only be responsible for your own happiness or belonging or whatever. That broken-part-piece-whole thing is just a trick of the mortal mind.”
As You Wish by Jackson Pearce is a cute, fun romance about a girl, her gay ex-boyfriend/best friend, and a genie. Since Viola is trying desperately to get over the heartbreak of losing Lawrence as a boyfriend, she inadvertently summons Jinn, who has to grant her three wishes.
Like I said, the story is cute and fun. It’s not entirely predictable–I mean, sure, Jinn was obviously going to fall in love with Viola and vice versa. But what keeps the story from being predictable and rote are the three main characters: Viola, Jinn, and Lawrence.
What I like the most about Viola is that she’s smart and thoughtful. She’s very careful with her wishes, not wanting to wish for something she knows she needs to change within herself nor does she want to wish for anything that could hurt someone else. That carefulness creates excellent conflict for her relationship with Jinn who wants to do nothing more than grant her three wishes quickly so he can get home. He doesn’t understand her thoughtfulness because he’s used to dealing with shallow people. More importantly, he doesn’t understand what it means to be human. Where he comes from conflict has mostly been removed, days blur into each other, and time mostly stands still. There is no heartache, no love, no deep longing for anyone or anything. Everything just is.
And then there’s Lawrence. Lawrence who regrets hurting Viola and wants nothing more than for her to be happy again. He has new found popularity now that he’s out and thoroughly himself, but that also means Viola is mostly excluded from his world. She isolates herself and is unhappy, and Lawrence feels responsible for her happiness in a way that’s not entirely fair for him but makes them very believable friends.
So, yeah, I liked the characters. In fact, the characters are what will stick with me about this book. That, and it’s like a fun take on Aladdin. You know how Aladdin’s all, “What would you wish for?” and Genie’s all, “To be free.” Well, Jinn is like, “For you to hurry up so I can go home and stop getting old.” Hahahaha.
I don’t know. It amuses me.
Source: Library
The Englishist 