THE WISHING GAME

A young woman’s dreams are in the hands of an eccentric author.

Lucy Hart is a 26-year-old kindergarten teacher’s assistant, desperate to adopt her orphaned former student, Christopher Lamb. Unfortunately, she lacks the funds. When Lucy wins a chance to compete in a game devised by reclusive children’s book author Jack Masterson, she hopes the competition will be the answer to her problems. Jack lives on a private island off the coast of Maine with his pet raven and his only friend, Hugo Reese, who illustrated his books, and, after years of silence, he’s finally written the next installment in his Clock Island series. Dismissing conventional channels for publishing, Jack has decided that whoever wins his competition can do whatever they like with the only copy of his book. Thus four competitors descend on the eponymous Clock Island—all of them former runaways who had gone to Jack’s island as children seeking reprieve from less-than-idyllic circumstances, and all of whom, in adulthood, have problems that only Jack can solve. Jack’s game starts off as a series of riddles (ones that readers will enjoy solving alongside the competitors) but quickly turns into something deeper as Jack, acting in the role of the Mastermind from his books, makes the competitors confront their traumas. Despite the sinister-sounding nature of the competition, Shaffer posits Jack as fatherly and loving, and Lucy and her opponents are mostly happy to play along. Shaffer’s characters are not fully developed, and Jack’s motives in particular feel a little trite. But, somewhat two-dimensional characters notwithstanding, readers will appreciate the interplay of whimsy and realism on the island: “Jack’s number one rule was Don’t break the spell. Lucy was under the spell of Jack Masterson, of Clock Island. Hugo wasn’t about to tell her that it wasn’t as wonderful as it looked, that the mysterious, mystical, magical Mastermind…had been drinking himself into an early grave for the past six years.”

A meditation on the power of hope when all else seems lost.