The Wishkeeper’s Apprentice by Rachel Chivers Khoo

Rating: Needs Parent Supervision

Reading Level: Late Elementary

I have such mixed feelings about this book! The plot is well put together, the ending has some surprising twists, and it’s pretty much everything you could hope for in a fantasy novel for an elementary school kid. But there are some major concerns!

Concerns:

• Confounding wishes and prayer. There’s a lot of mysticism around making wishes, keeping wishes, and granting wish requests. There’s a lot of issues with granting wishes that sound a lot like the issues with our prayer requests. Wishes are posited as the indicator of hope. This is not biblical ; our hope comes from faith in the Lord. Bottom line: A person who is not super mature in their faith could mix up wishes with prayer requests and develop a fragile and confusing theology.
• Scary nightmare monster. A furry wolf creature is the primary villain.
• Sibling issues. An older sister pays little notice to her younger brother, and acts like he is a burden more than a joy. This could play into any insecurities that your reader has about their relationship with older siblings. It is resolved in the book, but there isn’t a lot of resolution that’s realistic in the real world.
• Magic, wishes, ghosts, and magicians. The thing is, this is one of those books that the magic isn’t in a separate world; it’s hidden in and among our world. I think this is totally different than in say, Lord of the Rings, where magic is in a complete different universe.

I think this one is totally dependent on the daily and the reader. If you like this book, you’d love The Extremely Inconvenient Adventures of Bronte Metttlestone.