The Wish House (Hardcover)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The last thing fifteen-year-old Richard expects when he goes exploring near his parents' annual vacation spot is to find his familiar summer haunt, the abandoned cottage he calls the Wish House, suddenly occupied. An eccentric painter named Jay Dalton and his family have bought the place and turned it into a magnet for artists and writers that conventional Richard at first finds loud and strange. But the more time he spends with Jay, his fortune-telling wife Lucia, and their bewitching daughter Clio, the more Richard finds himself relaxing into their insouciant lifestyle.

Jay insists on that Richard sit for him, Lucia confides in him like a peer, while Clio becomes his first lover. Then Richard stumbles onto a shocking family secret that indicates his trust in the free-spirited family has been misplaced. Hurt and betrayed, Richard commits an irrevocable act of destruction that abruptly ends the alluring spell of the Wish House. Not until he attends Clio’s first gallery opening years later is he able to achieve closure on the events of that memorable and painful fifteenth summer.

Celia Rees has written an age appropriate "seduction of the innocent" story, a Henry James novel for the YA set. This wonderfully sensual young adult novel is permeated with evocative images of nature and mythology, while remaining restrained in its descriptions of teen sex and implied incest. Older teen fans of Looking for Alaska and How I Live Now will appreciate Rees' dark view into the baffling world of adult motivations. –Jennifer Hubert

From School Library Journal

Grade 9 Up–Richard looks back on his 15th summer, when he was vacationing with his family in Wales. It was 1976 when his fate became inextricably entwined with that of an artistic, bohemian family. Naive, middle-class Richard is bowled over by temperamental J. A. Dalton, famous artist and father of the seductive Clio. She and virgin Richard begin an affair, and it is soon clear that he is in way over his head. There are dark family secrets and the torment of a volatile painter with artist's block. An air of unreality surrounds the teens, who put themselves in a fantasy world based on British mythology, an obsession of Jay's. The man's current wife, Lucia, is a witch with a garden of all black plants, many of which are poisonous. Richard is drawn into the allure of this skinny-dipping, pot-smoking world. Inevitably he realizes the depths of the family's betrayal and their calculated use of him. He then sets in motion a series of events that haunt him until he is 21 and finds redemption. Readers might be confused by the opening, but the agony and ecstasy of first love are well conveyed. This sinister and intense novel will surely appeal to teens eager to follow the twists and turns of a tangled, yet affecting tale.–B. Allison Gray, John Jermain Library, Sag Harbor, NY
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Reading level: Young Adult
  
• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Candlewick (August 22, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0763629510
• ISBN-13: 978-0763629519
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #658,689 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A bold and realistic book written for more mature teen readers, January 3, 2007

By	Teenreads.com (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

Richard's family has been bringing their camper to the Welsh countryside almost every summer that he can remember. There he can meet up with his good friend Dylan, roam the wilderness, and generally run around unsupervised while his father goes fishing and his mother reads mystery novels.

But this summer, the year Richard is 15, is destined to be something entirely different. This year, when Richard goes exploring at the ruined manor house he and Dylan have dubbed "The Wish House," it's no longer abandoned. Instead, the Wish House has been occupied by a most unconventional family, the Daltons. From the start, when Richard encounters Lucia Dalton sunbathing nude in the house's garden, he realizes that this family is entirely unlike his own. Fascinated by Lucia and her brilliant artist husband Jethro, and utterly bewitched by their daughter Clio, Richard begins spending more and more time with this artistic family and their eccentric friends and relations.

The year is 1976, and free love, readily available marijuana and nudity are the norm among the Daltons' circle of friends. Richard, whose conventional family background is utterly unlike the bohemian Daltons, is at times intrigued by this alternative lifestyle and at other times repulsed by it. But thanks to his rapidly developing sexual relationship with Clio, Richard is willing to take the plunge, to accept the Daltons and become part of their world --- at least until he uncovers a secret that threatens to ruin everything.

A realistic novel about a young man's sexual coming of age, filled with betrayals, secrets and lies, might seem quite a departure for Celia Rees, best known for her historical novels PIRATES! and WITCH CHILD. However, Rees's many fans will find parallels in THE WISH HOUSE, with its air of mysticism, powerful symbolic imagery and reliance on the natural world (waves, forests, gardens full of black flowers) for its dense themes.

THE WISH HOUSE is definitely a novel for sophisticated readers; with frank talk about drugs and sexuality, not to mention hints of incest, it is clearly aimed at a mature teen audience. The adult themes of the book, in fact, will probably lead readers to suspect a more insidious secret than the one that actually lurks in the Wish House, resulting in somewhat of a letdown at the novel's end. That being said, though, Rees's bold new book, told in a series of flashbacks, does offer an intriguing glimpse into a particular time in recent history as seen through the eyes of one young man destined to be changed forever by what he sees.

--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars overreaching, boring and anticlimactic, April 26, 2007

By	Doralyn Rush "bibliophile" (Springfield, VA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

By the middle of this book, I found it difficult to continue reading due to how boring it was. The characters seemed fanciful and quite fictitious. There were hints throughout the book of foul play in someone's death and extreme embarrassment for the main character both of which wound up very anticlimactically almost like a ball of yarn unraveling and there was just the end. I also did not find a single sympathetic character. Even the main character seemed far too bland and clueless to elicit any real sympathy. I have read Rees before and really enjoyed her, but as far as this book is concerned, I suggest you not waste your time.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Elements of intrigue and the supernatural lend to a unusual love story and coming of age tale., October 7, 2006

By	Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

Richard has spent his summers at an abandoned house in the woods near his home since childhood, but this year a new family's moved in - and draws them into their strange circle. Soon Richard will do anything to be with their daughter Clio - even if it means abandoning the things he used to love in life. Elements of intrigue and the supernatural lend to a unusual love story and coming of age tale.