Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Book Review - The Wish List

A few days ago I read my sister’s Christmas gift, a book titled The Wish List a short novel by Eoin Colfer, the acclaimed writer of the ingenious (in my opinion) Artemis Fowl series.

The Wish List tells the story of a Meg, a fifteen-year-old girl, who, for the most part, hasn’t been that good. However, one last act of goodness, (a pretty big one), has given her the chance to evade eternal damnation in Hell, but it wasn’t big enough to get her past those Pearly White Gates of heaven. While stuck in limbo between Heaven and Hell she discovers that she has a chance to get to heaven. She goes back to help the old man she saved, a man who has had a pretty rotten life and is currently dying of heart disease.

As with the Artemis Fowl novels, Mr. Colfer does a great job of creating a sarcastic, annoying, protagonist, as well as adding a annoying computer genius who is to important to kill. While the character types are great, when looking back, one realizes that they were not unique, and were more or less the same characters with slightly different names (and races and genders). I’m not saying this is a bad thing, but when reading a novel, especially one that is not a sequel or continuation of a series, I expect it to have its own uniqueness, which The Wish List lacks.

This can go both ways however, Colfer’s characters, though perhaps cliché, are real, and though the book is short and his characters are, for the most part, pretty 2d, Colfer manages to make you like the protagonists right from the start.

The book was short. It had large print and barely 200 pages, though perhaps longer than most pocket-book novels. I read it in a day, in perhaps 3-4 hours. I’m not sure what the price was, and I know that it was inflated due to the important taxes we pay on books here (Bangladesh, for those who forgot), still, I have a feeling that you might consider buying this book before doing so, especially if you haven’t read any of the Artemis Fowl books.

The Wish List, though short, and perhaps did not live up entirely to my expecations, was still a great novel. Colfer manages to, in a short time, develop several entertaining characters, and put them in perhaps unreal, but nonetheless funny siduations.

Final Rating 7/10

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