WAND

A young girl wishes for change.

Eleven-year-old Mira feels like she must take responsibility for things around the house, like cooking and watching over stepsisters Sarah, 10, and Beans, 4. She wants to feel useful to Val, her late father’s wife, especially since they’ve had to do a lot of what Val calls “belt tightening.” But Mira, whose mom died when Mira was an infant, doesn’t feel like she belongs anywhere. Private school and gymnastics were other belt-tightening sacrifices, and she misses Shanice, her best friend from gymnastics. All Mira really has is an old pendant of her mother’s that she always wears. In her town of Between, Georgia, rumors are that the fenced-off Glass Pond leads to “someplace else” and that the strange, disoriented people sometimes found wandering nearby emerged from it. One day, Mira meets Lyndame, a mysterious teen girl with plum-colored hair who’s accompanied by a golden bird. Lyndame says her silver wand can grant wishes, and she offers Mira “three reasonably sized” ones, requesting her pendant in return. Multiple perennially popular fantasy tropes come into play in this novel, although there’s a long buildup before the mystery is revealed in a rapid-fire manner that doesn’t feel worth the wait. Main characters read white.

Has all the ingredients of a satisfying fantasy but is ultimately let down by uneven pacing.