The Wishing Game was born one rainy day when I was in the third grade. Our teacher Mrs. Glenn turned off the lights and put on Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory for us to watch while she graded papers. In the dark at my little desk, I watched, mesmerized.

It’s been a favorite film of mine ever since, and I rewatch it every couple of years, finding something new to delight in every time. I always cry when Willy places his hand on the sacrifice Charlie has made of his Everlasting Gobstopper and whispers, “So shines a good deed in a weary world . . .”

The world was feeling very weary and tired in the autumn of 2021. It seemed like the pandemic would never end. The idea for The Wishing Game had rolled around my mind for years, but I’d never started it. Then during lockdown, I asked myself, “If not now, then when?”

So I wrote it. A few ideas came together in the book—stuck in our houses, people were reading more books than they had in years. It made me think about the books that formed and shaped my life. I kept returning to the children’s books I loved, rereading every year: A Wrinkle in Time, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Westing Game. And I remembered an All Things Considered episode I’d heard years earlier, the story of a lonely teenage boy who ran away from home and turned up on the doorstep of Piers Anthony, his favorite author. I thought of how broke I was in my twenties, mired in debt, how hopeless I felt that I would ever have the simplest things in life—a home, a family, a chance to write one book, maybe two?

Writing The Wishing Game, this love letter of a book to books, helped me write my way out of weariness. I hope its readers also find a little happiness on this journey with Lucy and Christopher, Jack, and Hugo.

Make a wish!

— Meg Shaffer

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Author Photo Credit: Chanel Nicole Co.