Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Foreword
THE STRANGE STORY OF BOBBY BOX
PEARL’S FATEFUL WISH
WISHES
THE PROTECTIONIST
THE GREAT WALL
NELL
WHAT I WISH FOR
REASONS
THE LOST ART OF LETTER WRITING
SECRET SONG
THE STEPSISTER
ROSANNA
I WISH I COULD LIVE (IN A BOOK)
FUNNY THINGS
CAUTIOUS WISHING
THE RULES FOR WISHING
CONJURERS -
THE SKY BLUE BALL
EDITOR’S NOTE
SELECTED ONLINE RESOURCES AT BOOKWISH. ORG.
THE AUTHORS
Acknowledgements
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS • ADIVISION OF PENGUIN YOUNG READERS GROUP.
Published by The Penguin Group.
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3,
Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.).
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England.
Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.).
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd).
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India.
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd).
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank,
Johannesburg 2196, South Africa.
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England.
Collection copyright © 2011 by Book Wish Foundation.
Foreword copyright © 2011 by Mia Farrow. “The Strange Story of Bobby Box” copyright © 2011 by Alexander McCall Smith. “Pearl’s Fateful Wish” copyright © 2011 by Jeanne DuPrau. “Wishes” copyright © 2011 by Jane Yolen. “The Protectionist” copyright © 2011 by Meg Cabot. “The Great Wall” copyright © 2011 by Sofia Quintero. “Nell” copyright © 2011 by Karen Hesse. “What I Wish For” copyright © 2011 by Gary Soto. “Reasons” copyright © 2011 by John Green. “The Lost Art of Letter Writing” copyright © 2011 by Ann M. Martin. “Secret Song” copyright © 2011 by Naomi Shihab Nye. “The Stepsister” copyright © 2011 by Cynthia Voigt. “Rosanna” copyright © 2004, 2011 by Cornelia Funke. Originally published by Verlag Friedrich Oetinger, Germany, 2004, with illustrations by Jackie Gleich. “I Wish I Could Live (In A Book)” copyright
© 2011 by Nikki Giovanni. “Funny Things” copyright © 2011 by R. L. Stine. “Cautious
Wishing” copyright © 2011 by Marilyn Nelson. “The Rules for Wishing” copyright © 2011 by
Francisco X. Stork. “Conjurers” copyright © 2011 by Nate Powell. “The Sky Blue Ball” from
Small Avalanches and Other Stories copyright © 2003 by The Ontario Review, Inc.
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without
permission in writing from the publisher, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, a division of Penguin Young
Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.
G. P. Putnam’s Sons, Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
ISBN : 978-1-101-53566-0
http://us.penguingroup.com
To the more than 250,000 Darfuris living in refugee camps in Chad.
“Nothing is more important for children than education. It is the promise of a better future. And nowhere is this more true than in eastern Chad, where education helps protect against risks ranging from early marriage to recruitment into armed forces. The authors of this book have generously given the gift of their stories to help create a better and more hopeful world for these young people. By reading them, you are doing the same. Thank you.”
—ANTÓNIO GUTERRES, UN High Commissioner for Refugees
FOREWORD
Since 2004, I have made thirteen journeys into the Chad/Darfur region. I have friends in refugee camps across eastern Chad. Whenever I visit, the kids swarm around me, shyly chanting my name as they pull me toward their tents or huts, where I sit on the mat and their mother serves thick, sugary tea. We communicate in a blend of (very) elementary Arabic, French, gales of laughter and improvised sign language. But there is always at least one kid who will eventually appear and be able to speak all those languages—and sometimes English too.
Mohammed is just such a boy. For almost eight years he has lived in Djabal refugee camp with his older brother. The boys had been tending the family goats when their village was attacked. With their baby sister tied to Mohammed’s back, they hid in the brush and watched their village burn. When the baby cried, they covered her mouth. Afterward they searched for their parents but both had been killed. The children joined some other survivors and they walked for nine days—into Chad. The baby did not survive the journey.
Mohammed taught himself to speak then to read English and French by befriending the UNHCR1 team and going through wastepaper baskets in the offices. “I want to be a doctor,” Mohammed told me. “If only I could have a teacher.” Pointing to a distant mountain, he said, “I would walk to that mountain and back every day if I could go to secondary school.”
Despite his losses, and nearly eight years in a refugee camp with no end in sight, Mohammed’s dream is very much alive. And this is the amazing thing; no matter how dire the circumstances or bleak the prospects, every child I have met in Chad, Sudan, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, or Angola has a dream. Their faces light up when I ask them, “What do you hope to be when you grow up?” “I want to be a doctor, a teacher, a pilot, the president of my country,” they shout excitedly. The children long for peace, and even when they don’t have enough food, they hunger for a teacher, for books—for the education they know is essential to make their dreams come true.
The stories in this book are about wishes. Just as the first story says, it is never too late for wishes to come true. We can still help the people of Darfur. For refugees worldwide, this year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the United Nations agreement that gives them protection, the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. They are still there, hoping, wishing, dreaming—and we can still help.
MIA FARROW
Actor, Advocate,
UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador,
and Mother
January 23, 2011
Nearly two-thirds of the 250,000 refugees from Darfur are children.
Photo Credit: UNHCR / H. Caux
ALEXANDER McCALL SMITH
THE STRANGE STORY OF BOBBY BOX
Have you ever thought of what your life story would sound like if you told it to somebody? Many people would probably say, “Not all that unusual” or “Not very interesting.” And maybe that’s true—for most of us—but then there are people whose life stories are very different. If they told us what had happe
ned to them, we might think, “This can’t be true” or perhaps “You’re making it up.”
That’s what they said to Bobby. They said that he must be making it up—but he wasn’t, you know. Everything he said about what happened to him was true—down to the very last detail. And now here’s his story.
1
Most life stories begin with parents. So you say something like, “My mother was twenty-five when she had me. She had dark black hair and a lovely smile and . . .” And so on. Bobby could not say this. He never knew his mother, and he never knew his father. This was because he was found in an open-topped wooden box, one used for packing oranges, floating down a river. A fisherman who was rowing his boat upstream saw the box coming down to meet him, moving slowly in the middle of the current. He shipped his oars and waited for the box to draw level with him, and you can imagine his surprise when he saw what it contained. “By all the stars in heaven,” he muttered as he reached out to grab the side of the box before it floated past. “By all the stars in heaven—and the moon too!” That may sound like a strange thing to say, but then the sight of a box containing a little baby wrapped up in a white blanket was a rather strange sight.
Taking great care, the fisherman took the baby from the box and laid him down on the bottom of his boat. Then he slipped his oars back into the rowlocks and rowed as fast as he could for the jetty he used, which was just a short distance upstream. Unfortunately he forgot all about the box, which drifted away with the current and was never seen again. This was a mistake, because it might have contained some clue as to who the baby was. There might have been a letter, or perhaps even a note saying something like This baby is the property of . . . and then given a name. As it was, there was nothing on the blanket or on the baby’s clothes to give any idea of who he was and why he had been put into this tiny vessel, this orange box, and made to float down the river.
“You should have looked,” said the policeman to whom the fisherman later reported his extraordinary find. “You should have looked in the box. You were very careless!”
The fisherman defended himself. “What could I do?” he protested. “I had to get the baby into the boat. I couldn’t fiddle about with the box as well.”
They left it at that, but the policeman was clearly annoyed. Remember that this all took place in a remote part of Scotland, in a place where he was the only policeman for twenty miles or so. Now here he was landed with a baby, of all things, and his wife was away staying with her sister on the island of Skye for a month. How could he be expected to look after this baby?
He told the fisherman to sit down while he wrote an entry in his book. “Time: 2:30 p.m. Lost property brought into station. Nature of lost property: one baby (male). Action: returned to finder for safekeeping.”
Satisfied with the entry in his book, he looked at the fisherman and told him what he would have to do. “You found this baby,” he said. “You’ll have to look after it, I’m afraid.”
The fisherman’s eyes widened with astonishment. He struggled to find words, and eventually all that he could say was, “What?”
The policeman explained, “We have no room here to keep a baby. And babies require food and . . . and all sorts of things. You found this baby—you look after him. Sorry about that, but that’s the law.”
The fisherman knew little about the law—in fact, he knew nothing about it. And in those days, when a policeman told you that the law said this or that, you believed him. So he picked up the baby and took him home to the small cottage that he had on the edge of the bay. He had no idea what to do. The baby was beginning to cry, and the fisherman thought that perhaps he was hungry. When he got home, he would give him some fish to eat, he decided.
2
“Give fish to a baby?” exclaimed the fisherman’s aunt. “Are you crazy?”
The fisherman did not have a wife, and so he had called for help from his aunt, who was married to the man who ran the village shop. At first she had not believed him when she received the message that there was a baby and her advice was needed. But when she arrived at the fisherman’s house, she found the fisherman trying to feed the baby a small piece of fish that he had cooked and put in a bowl.
“He’s hungry,” said the fisherman.
“That may be so,” said the aunt. “But you don’t give such a small baby solid foods like that.”
“Not even fish?” asked the fisherman.
“Not even fish,” said the aunt. “And anyway, where did you get this baby?”
The fisherman told her the story. As he did so, the aunt took the baby and wiped the small bits of fish from his face. “Poor little thing,” she said. “You’ve been abandoned, haven’t you?”
“Whoever did it was very cruel,” said the fisherman. “He could easily have drowned.”
The aunt nodded. “Well, he’s safe now, I’m happy to say. And we can take him into town and hand him over to the babies’ home. There’s a place that takes babies—orphans and the like. They’ll look after him.” She touched the baby gently on the cheek, comforting him. “Shall we give him a name?”
The fisherman thought for a moment. “Bobby,” he said.
“Why Bobby?” asked his aunt.
“Suits him,” said the fisherman.
“All right,” said the aunt. “Bobby it is. Bobby Box, because he was found in a box.”
“Good idea,” said the fisherman.
They took Bobby into town in the fisherman’s old car. The aunt sat with the baby in the back because the springs in the front were broken and the baby would have a softer ride that way. After half an hour of bumping and bouncing, they found themselves outside a rather grim-looking building on which the words HOME FOR BABIES (AND SMALL CHILDREN) were carved in stone above the front door. And beneath that, there was a bell with a small notice that said, All orphaned or lost babies welcome. Ring for attention.
The aunt rang, and after a minute or two the door was opened by a woman wearing a blue dress and a small, starched white cap. She looked down immediately at the baby in the aunt’s arms. “Oh no!” she sighed. “Not another one!”
3
So it was that Bobby went to live in a babies’ and children’s home. And that was where he stayed for the next six years. He was not very happy there—the beds were hard and lumpy and no matter which way you tried to lie, you could never get really comfortable. And that was not the only thing that he did not like about the home: the food was another problem, and the bullying, which nobody did anything about.
The food first. There was never quite enough of it, and there was not a single child, not one, who did not go to bed hungry. Now, waking up hungry is bad enough, but going to bed with hunger pangs gnawing at your stomach is another thing altogether. You lie there, feeling the sides of your empty stomach clinging to your ribs, and think about food. You cannot help it—no matter how hard you try. You just think about food. You think about large pieces of bread, thickly spread with butter and red jam. You think about cakes, and chocolate, and pies covered with sweet yellow custard. You think about bacon sandwiches and marzipan animals. You think about apples and plums, and fried potatoes with crispy brown skins. You think about everything you know you will never get.
Then the bullying. Although many of the children who lived in this home were very small, there were some older ones too. These children were ten or twelve or even fourteen or fifteen. They had been there for a long time, and they lived in two rooms at the top of the building. One of these rooms was labeled BOYS and the other GIRLS. The smaller children were not allowed up there and so they did not see that the older children had taken the best beds and the best rugs and the best of everything.
The leader of the older boys was a very fat boy called Ern. He was fourteen and had spiky red hair. He had a bed at the end of the room and it was piled high with the blankets he had stolen from all the smaller children. It could get rather cold at night, but Ern never felt the chilly air once he was tucked up in his bed with its numero
us blankets. Down below, in their bleak, cold rooms, the children whose blankets had been stolen had to make do with a thin coverlet, or a doubled-up sheet, and would shiver their way through the night, drifting in and out of sleep, dreaming, no doubt, of icebergs and polar bears.
Ern was a bully. He would grab the smaller children’s ears or noses and twist them until their eyes watered. Some of the children’s noses were an odd shape as a result of this treatment, and Ern laughed at this. “What’s wrong with your nose?” he would crow. “Walked into a door?”
Did Mavis Broon, the woman who ran the home, know that this was going on? She did. Did she do anything to stop it? She did not, not even when she saw Ern helping himself to the younger children’s food.
“Don’t eat too much, Ern,” she said mildly.
“No, I won’t, don’t worry, Mavis old girl,” said Ern, popping into his mouth potatoes meant for the smaller children, who would go hungry as a result.
That was the way it was, and that was what Bobby had to put up with until shortly after his sixth birthday, when Mavis Broon sold him to a farmer who wanted a boy to help him to look after his sheep and help cut the hay. She was not meant to sell the children, but she did, spending the money on whisky, which she drank at night, in her room, listening to the radio playing dance tunes until well past midnight.
4
There was more to eat at the farmer’s house. So that was one thing that was better in poor Bobby Box’s life, even if there was little improvement in other respects. His bed was just as uncomfortable, and his room, which was reached by climbing up a small wooden staircase in the barn, was just as cold. It was lonely—sleeping out in the barn with only the animals for company—and scary too, as when he was woken up one night by a great owl that had flown into the barn and was swooping around, trying to find a way out.
What You Wish For Page 1