Name: The Wish Maker
ISBN: 9781594488757

Ali Sethi

Zaki Shirazi, a young Pakistani in a household dominated by his mother and grandmother, is close to his female cousin, Samar Api, but while Samar's reckless teenage behavior brings consequences for her, Zaki is free to explore the world, only later reflec

The Wish Maker

Jaymie Lemke

The Wish Maker is about a Pakistani boy who is growing up without a father, in the midst of governmental strife and in a house full of women. I thought that many parts of this book were honest and gritty. And I really enjoyed those parts. I had high interest in the beginning of the book, but at the end, I was still confused who the characters were. I felt like more time should have been devoted to character development and defining more of the cultural terms for the audience. I liked the main character, I just wished he had a stronger voice throughout the whole book.

Ali's writing style is confusing to me. On some pages, the conversations happened in paragraph form and on other pages, it happened in line by line all the way down the page. The use of the Pakistani language was confusing to me too. Sometimes the words were translated, sometimes not. Sometimes the main characters voice was loud (like when Zaki went to school), sometimes I didn't know who was narrating or even at what point of the story it was being told (was it someone remembering? someone speaking about now?) Normally, I can understand why the author's style changed and am able to follow the flow of the story. I wish I could say the same for this book. I feel like this book has the potential to be a great book, but it's just not there yet. Some heavy re-working of the text is needed first. I was disappointed at best.

Melanie Richards

The first one hundred pages, as people said, were a little hard to get into, with the swirl of characters that we hadn't grown to love yet. However, Sethi backtracked and offered a rich history of Zaki's family, a history shaped by the political tensions in Pakistan. I really enjoyed reading a story about ordinary people existing in a world I know very little about. One improvement might be to explain the italicized words whose meaning I did not know. It was peculiar that the author explained American products or customs throughout the book, but I figured this was a device to show how they were received by the main characters.

All in all, good book if you stick with it :)

The Wish Maker

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