What You Wish For is the third book I've read by Katherine Center and while I enjoyed it well enough, my favorite book of hers so far is still Things You Save in a Fire from last year, which I felt was a much better written and more emotionally resonant story.
This time around, the story revolves around Samantha Casey, a librarian at an elementary school on the island of Galveston, Texas. Sam arrives at the quaint little school a few years ago after spending most of her life alone in California. The school's founder Max and his wife Babette are beloved figures in the community and despite having a daughter of their own, they welcome Sam into their school as well as their home, becoming surrogate parents of sorts to her. When Max dies unexpectedly, a man named Duncan Carpenter is brought in to replace him as principal of the school — it turns out Duncan is a former colleague of Sam's from her previous school, but not only that, she also had a huge crush on him back in the day. The Duncan that Sam knew was sweet, funny, charismatic, and beloved by everyone (a personality very similar to Max), so despite her conflicted feelings, Sam tries to convince the faculty at the school that he is the right man for the job. But she soon finds out how wrong she is, as the Duncan who shows up is stoic, stiff, completely devoid of humor, and super obsessed with school safety, almost to the point of paranoia. When Duncan threatens to make significant changes to the school, Sam decides to oppose him and, working together with the rest of the faculty, a plan is hatched to save the school. At the same time, Sam finds out the truth of what happened to Duncan in the years that they lost contact — this revelation, along with a secret about her own self that she had been hiding, alter Sam's perspective in ways that she didn't anticipate.
This is a romance, so of course the love story between the two main characters— in this case, Sam and Duncan — will undoubtedly be front and center. Given the premise, I expected there to be a certain amount of predictability to the story, which is fine. What felt different for me with this book compared to Center's previous ones is that there didn't seem to be as much emotional depth to the story this time around. Yes, there were difficult subjects and issues the characters had to deal with, just like in the rest of her books, but I felt like much of it just scratched the surface instead of exploring more in depth. Perhaps it is because of this that I didn't feel much of an emotional connection to the characters or to the story. While I liked Sam as a character well enough, sometimes she did behave immaturely, which did annoy me a little bit. In fact, with some of the scenes and dialogue, I kind of felt like there was a bit of a YA vibe to the story and the writing, which I wasn't expecting — though it (thankfully) didn't permeate the story, it did make the writing feel uneven in places.
Overall, this was a decent read — lighthearted, fun in certain places, a bit sappy in others. I also found this one to be a bit dialogue-heavy during some of the more emotional scenes, which had the effect of taking me out of the moment at times — another reason why it was harder for me to establish an emotional connection to the story. As I mentioned earlier, I like Katherine Center's previous novel better, but this was one I didn't regret reading. And of course, I definitely don't mind reading more of her novels either!
Received ARC from St. Martin's Press via NetGalley.
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