How to Make a Wish

Overview

Grace has learned to expect disappointment from the people meant to take care of her. Raised by a mother whose moods swing without warning, she has quietly stopped believing that anything good might simply arrive. Wishing, to Grace, feels like a habit for people who haven't yet been let down.

That changes when Eva enters her life. Eva carries her own hard circumstances, yet she still moves through the world as though good things are possible. The two begin sneaking out together at night, meeting on the beach in a string of stolen hours that belong only to them.

When Eva admits that her attraction is to girls, something shifts in Grace — not just in how she sees Eva, but in how she allows herself to imagine her own future. The novel follows both the fragile, complicated bond between Grace and her mother and the tentative, electric connection growing between Grace and Eva, tracing how two teenagers find each other precisely when each needs it most.

A Story About Learning to Want Things Again

Much of the novel's weight comes from its portrait of a parent-child relationship defined by inconsistency rather than cruelty — Grace's mother is never simply a villain, which makes the toll of her unpredictability harder to name and harder to escape. Against that backdrop, Ashley Herring Blake sets a queer coming-of-age romance that unfolds in secrecy, built on the kind of nighttime escapes that feel both thrilling and precarious for teenagers testing who they are away from adult supervision.

The book sits within a wave of young adult fiction that treats a girl's realization that she is attracted to another girl not as a plot twist to be sensationalized, but as one part of a larger story about resilience, trust, and the slow work of believing in a better life. Its emotional core is less about romance for its own sake than about what it takes for a guarded person to let hope back in.

Why How to Make a Wish Has Been Challenged

Disagreement over this title has tended to center on where it belongs on a shelf — specifically, whether its content is suited to the younger end of the young adult readership or whether it should be reserved for older teens. The objections driving that question are substantive rather than incidental: reviewers have pointed to the developing same-sex relationship between Grace and Eva, including physical intimacy between them, as well as the depiction of Grace's unstable and at times neglectful home life, as material some find inappropriate for school library shelves. Concerns about underage characters sneaking out at night to meet romantic partners have also factored into objections, alongside broader discomfort with LGBTQ+ themes appearing in books accessible to younger students. In the catalog tracked here, the title has drawn a challenge in 1 state and 1 school district.