How to Make a Wish

this has such impeccable summer vibes I'm mad I read it in April
likes:
- soft f/f romance (bi MC and queer love interest)
- wholesome m/f platonic friendship
- exploration of grief, mother/daughter relationships, feeling “broken”

dislikes:
- I'm finding this author writes very lyrically w/lots of metaphors and I'm not the biggest fan of it but that's 100% personal taste. some parts are soso beautiful to me and others are just over the top & make me cringe a bit

For a long time, when I was a little younger, I thought that was how every girl saw other girls - this mix between beauty and awe and curiosity, a thin layer of lust just underneath.

trigger warnings: alcoholism, emotional abuse, neglect

Sweet lord, this book utterly struck something within me.

How to Make a Wish follows Grace Glasser, a seventeen year old girl who's never really seemed to have anything permanent apart from her best friend and her love for music. After moving into yet another house with yet another of her mum's less than permanent boyfriends, Grace meets Eva, a biracial girl consumed by grief from the recent death of her mother.
Eva likes girls, always has and always will, and her frankness about it stirs up buried thoughts she's never really had the chance to fully explore. As Eva starts to become a bigger and bigger part of Grace's life, she also becomes a bigger part of her problems, which leads to heavy consequences for everyone involved.

A love story between a lesbian and a bisexual girl with an unexpected happy ending: sign me up.

How to Make a Wish is both heartbreaking and heart making (I know that's not a real thing but).
It's a sweet love story with massive undertones of mental illness from all three of the main females. It's realistic and raw and it made me feel things.

The severe power and responsibility imbalance between Grace and Maggie haunted me a little after I read this. I've been Grace. I've been the girl who had to grow up too quickly, and be the parent to the parent. I related too much to having a parent who seems wonderful on the surface, but is completely different and full of problems in private. I am Grace and that's why I loved this book.
The thing is, I also felt some sympathy for Maggie, and that's just a testament to how good Ashley Herring Blake's writing is. Maggie has ruined parts of Grace's life, has neglected her, but yet I feel almost as sorry for her as I do for Grace.

It's not often I read something I identify with so completely, but that's what this book was for me. Because of that it'll always be special.

5/5
I want to say a lot of things about this book but I probably won't. I may forget some and others will be to hard to explain.

Starting by saying it made me tear up a bit. I was kind of surprised to see the tears well up on my eyes as i read. I don't understand why if i wasn't sad but i guess it made me feel something.

Talking more about the book. I really enjoyed the side characters, there were plenty (some books lack characters) and they were likeable. No one seemed over do or fake to me.

I also enjoyed there were no dramatic fights or over the top misunderstandings. All the characters stayed mature through the book; a great example would be Grace who even though all the pain and guilt she feel inside she never mistreated Eva for getting along with her Mother.
I was a bit eery about how the author would handle the situation about Maggie treating Eva like daughter better than Grace and Grace and Eva being together at the same time. I thought at some point it would blow up and Grace would say something about the lines “You mother stealer” or some cringe shit but it was gracefully handled (thank you Ashley)

I'm glad that nothing big really happened (sa, death)

I read some reviews saying that who meets someone and then randomly appears at their window and it's true it was weird but it's the only thing that happened that it didn't make sense.

I loved the internal dialogue of Grace, how it was worded and paced. I really can't explain it well