Reviews for The Wish Maker

The average rating for The Wish Maker based on 2 reviews is 1 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-08-25 00:00:00 Mike Piazza I really disliked this book. It was painful to get through. By the end, I was just skimming, trying to finish, hoping something redeeming would happen. I should have just quit reading like I wanted to initially. Nothing happens in this book. There is no plot. At all. The narration skips all over the place--from the main character to his mother, to his grandmother...ahh! And Sethi would rarely just come out and say anything--he kept using this superfluous, flowery language to hint at things happening. In my opinion, this method of narration is effective if it's used once or twice in a book; when it happens every other page, it's just annoying. The synopsis on the dust jacket (it's the description that Goodreads uses) seems to have very little to do with the book itself. Here are my problems with the description of the book: Supposedly this is a tale of "sacrifice, betrayal, and indestructible friendship." First of all, "sacrifice": I guess you could say that Zaki's mother had to make some sacrifices; however, I mostly got the feeling that she was an innatentive, self-absorbed mother who was more concerned about politics than she was about her son. Zaki's probably the one who had to give up the most, his mother for his country, but since he had no say in this, I'm not really sure it counts as a sacrifice. Now "betrayal": The only betrayal I can think of is when Samar's school friend, Tara, turns on her. But guess what. The exact same thing happens every single day between bratty little girls in junior high, so I don't really think that counts. And then "indestructible friendship"? I suppose this is talking about the friendship between cousins Zaki and Samar. However, it kind of seems like it was destructible--she goes back to live with her mom, he goes to America, and they never talk again. And I didn't really get that they were such good friends to begin with anyway. There isn't any character development between the two in the book. When they do hang out, it just seems like Samar kind of orders Zaki around and he just dumbly agrees to everything she says, no matter how ridiculous it is. I guess he was upset when she had to go back and live with her crazy parents, as evidenced by him acting out in school, but there just didn't seem to be a very strong correlation there. And he seemed fine once he went to the new school, so that almost seemed to negate the idea that his behavior was caused by the loss of his cousin. And the final paragraph: But adolescence approaches and the cousins' fates diverge. Samar's unconventional behavior'in which Zaki has played the role of devoted helper'brings severe consequences for her, while Zaki is sent out to discover the world for himself. It is only after years of separation from Samar that he is forced to confront the true nature of happiness, selfhood, and commitment to those he loves most. Samar's "unconventional behavior" seemed more like teenage rebellion than anything very earth shattering. Maybe the author just hasn't spent much time around adolescent girls. The "severe consequences" may have happened, but they weren't described. Samar simply goes back to live with her parents and then several years later is mentioned again. Big deal. If something happened in the interim, let us know! In a society where a woman who admits to being raped may be stoned to death as an adulteress unless she can produce four males to testify in her behalf, Samar seemed to have gotten off pretty darn easily, in my opinion. And I'm not sure when Zaki ever confronted "the true nature of happiness, selfhood and commitment to those he loves most." When exactly did that happen? He writes some emails to his mom and he admits to the reader, in a passage that could easily be overlooked or misunderstood, that he is a homosexual. I guess that was it. To sum it up, I'm just in a really bad mood about this book. I was excited to read it after looking over the dust jacket description, but now that I've finished it, I feel like I've been lied to or something.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-05-05 00:00:00 Greg Bedaker I had high hopes for this book. I know very little about Pakistani culture, and still know very little. Understanding that this is a novel, and not meant to teach me about anything, I still just could not get interested in the many characters this is written about. It is centered on a young boy, Zaki, and what he goes through living with a lot of women, including a female cousin Samar Api from whom most of the teen-aged type drama comes from. His day to day experiences are written out, and the prose was nothing to complain about, it was simply the dryness of the actual story that made it difficult to read. It reverts from Zaki's point of view to then focusing on his mother, at an earlier time, and at another interval it goes into a different character, at another time... I just could not get my head wrapped around it since it bounced me around like a ping-pong ball. I dislike books that go back and forth in time with multiple characters as I cannot get a mental grip on it. I assume the author was aiming for a family saga type of genre with the way the many characters were given special attention, from the grandmother to the cousin to a friend. It actually started off promising, I did enjoy it for the first 100 pages or so. And this is a debut novel so I was making allowances for it. But it was about halfway through when I started feeling let down. I did appreciate the referrals to Benazir, although I had to use Wikipedia to figure out the reality of what was going on when they forced Benazir Bhutto out as Prime Minister for the first time. I disliked Zaki's sexual experiences, which were few, but it probably jaded and disgusted me from then and there. Yet, I read the book to about page 305 of my Advance Reading Copy and just flipped through the rest, I spent 4 days on this book and did not look forward to having to pick it up again. I wanted to get to some point where I would say "this was worth it" but I didn't foresee it happening. I am fully aware that this is my opinion only, and I can see on Amazon two favorable reviews on it so there has got to be an audience for this coming-of-age-story-in-a-round-about-way-type of book (is there a plot here?). Perhaps for those in or close to Pakistan this would be a winner. Unfortunately, that just wasn't me for this one. I am curious to know what others felt about it though, am I just a complete fool who cannot recognize pure genius? We shall see.