THE WISH HOUSE
Celia Rees
Candlewick Press
Fiction
ISBN-10: 0763629510
ISBN-13: 9780763629519
272 pages

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

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