THE DECODING OF LANA MORRIS

Sixteen-year-old foster child Lana Morris has a lot of wishes. She wants her conniving foster mother, Veronica, to treat her like a foster daughter rather than a housemaid and a threat. She’d like to be accepted by the local teens, have friends other than her special-needs foster brothers and sister, and to figure out her relationship with her foster father. In a cluttered antique shop with an aged proprietress, Lana finds a Ladies’ Drawing Kit containing 13 pink speckled sheets of paper and some charcoal pencils. When she draws, the first two sketches come true, and now all she has to decide is what to do with the remaining 11 wishes. Then she faces the threat of ejection from her foster home. Lana draws and contemplates her wishes against a background of subplots on the nature of romance, marriage and the need to belong. The small-town summer setting gives the work a feeling of a slow, almost magical unfolding of events. Each of these events is enthralling, leading to a tidy, upbeat ending. The peripheral characters are distinctive and in Veronica’s case, terrifying. A subtle yet complex, slightly surreal story about the power of wishing. (Fiction. YA)