The Magic Kingdom Book

The wonderful Dalkey archive have a great casebook online with some free essays on this book:

The "Make a wish" foundation states its mission as the following:

Wishes are more than just a nice thing
A wish experience can be a game-changer for a child with a life-threatening medical condition.

This one belief guides us in everything we do at Make-A-Wish®. It inspires us to grant wishes that change the lives of the kids we serve. It compels us to be creative in exceeding the expectations of every wish kid. It drives us to make our donated resources go as far as possible.

Most of all, it's the founding principle of our vision to grant the wish of every eligible child.

Wishes are more than just a nice thing. And they are far more than gifts, or singular events in time. Wishes impact everyone involved - wish kids, volunteers, donors, sponsors, medical professionals and communities. The impact varies. For wish kids, just the act of making their wish come true can give them the courage to comply with their medical treatments. Parents might finally feel like they can be optimistic. And still others might realize all they have to offer the world through volunteer work or philanthropy.

Whatever the odds, whatever the obstacles ... wishes find a way to make the world better.

There are people who can read that with a positive mind-set, and simply applaud the organisation and its viewpoint. And there are others, and I am one of them, who find it all deeply problematic (even though, of course, I have no real right to comment, not being either a dying child or the parent of one. All of these comments are written from a privileged perspective, and god knows how I would feel if anything happened to my son). It is problematic, not least because it fails to take into account the fact that such donations might be better spent on finding cures for terminal diseases, rather than a day swimming with dolphins or a trip to Disney World. And what happens to these kids the day after their wish has come true? When they are back in the hospital bed with nothing now to dream of but their long and painful decline?

How do we face the horrific and impossibly bleak reality of a seven year old dying in pain, with nothing to look forward to but an end to the suffering? How does one write about such a thing without descending into maudlin pathos and mawkish, oprah-style sob-stories?

Elkin shows us how. You do it with prose firing on all cylinders, prose which uses all the tricks and techniques available to it. You do it with humour and sorrow, with an unflinching and unromanticised gaze. This takes Greatness. Elkin has it. We should be grateful for that.