The Wishing Game by Meg Shaffer

THE WISHING GAME by Meg Shaffer is, for me, reminiscent of some childhood mysteries like Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game or E. L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler or Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Velvet Room. They allowed for young readers to put themselves into a character’s shoes and try to puzzle out a situation. In THE WISHING GAME, Shaffer brings four adults, former runaway children, to Clock Island, the home of Jack Masterson, a best-selling children’s author. He has devised a new game where one of them could win what is essentially a fortune: the only copy of his new book. A main character, Lucy who workers as a teacher’s aide, is desperate to win so that she could afford to foster and eventually adopt seven year-old Christopher. The clues are often word games and/or require knowledge of the best-selling series. The story is entertaining, but a bit slow moving in parts with a budding romance (between Lucy and the books' illustrator, Hugo Reese) for further distraction. Described as whimsical and charming by other reviewers, THE WISHING GAME is a LibraryReads selection for May and received a starred review from Publishers Weekly.