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Review: What You Wish For by multiple authors

Title: What You Wish For: a book for Darfur
Author: "Your favorite authors"
Genre: YA Short Stories
Pages: 254
Rating: 4 out of 5
Challenges
FTC Disclosure: I was given this book by an editor at the publishing company and I am going to put it into my school library's collection
Summary (from the inside flap of the book): What You Wish For has brought together a stunning and potent international roster of authors and includes not only stories and poems by some of the best talent writing for youth today, but also a graphic story. This affecting collection celebrates the simple wishes--home, family, safety and love, things we all wish for--of the Darfuri refugees with incredible grace, beauty and ofttimes humor. It's a special and inspiring collection poised to lave an indelible mark on its readers.

Review: This book just showed up in my mailbox one day and I thought it was a great idea to have a whole bunch of famous YA writers pen stories on a theme. None of the stories is about Darfur, but the proceeds from the book (all authors wrote for free) go to create libraries for the Darfur refugees living in eastern Chad.

Here are the authors included in the book:

  • Alexander McCall Smith--author of the No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency
  • Jeanne DuPrau--author of The City of Embers series
  • Jane Yolen--author of The Devil's Arithmetic
  • Meg Cabot--author of the Princess Diaries series
  • Sofia Quintero--education activist
  • Marilyn Nelson--poet
  • Karen Hesse--author of Letters from Rifka
  • Gary Soto--author of Buried Onions
  • John Green--author of Looking for Alaska
  • Ann M. Martin--author of the Babysitter's Club series
  • Naomi Shihab Nye--poet
  • Cynthia Voigt--author of Bad Girls
  • Cornelia Funke--author of the Inkheart series
  • Nikki Giovanni--poet
  • R.L. Stine--author of the Goosebumps series
  • Francisco X. Stork--author of Marcelo in the Real World
  • Nate Powell--graphic novelist and author of Swallow Me Whole
  • Joyce Carol Oates--author of Freaky Green Eyes
While each of these stories had something good in it, my favorite was Meg Cabot's The Protectionist. I have never read anything by Meg Cabot, but am now definitely going to read one of her novels.

I think that is one of the greatest things about this book, the reader gets to sample each of these authors and perhaps readers will be inspired to read novels by some of them.


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