The Wonderful Wishes of B. - Hardcover

Nolte, Katherin

 
9780593565148: The Wonderful Wishes of B.
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593565142 ISBN 13: 9780593565148
Verlag: Random House Books for Young Readers, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

All that stands between ten-year-old Beatrice and an amazing life are five wishes…and she’s got a plan to make them all come true! A magical and heartfelt adventure about grief, hope, and the power of human connection.

Beatrice Corwell has a crooked haircut, eight well-trained cats, and a plan: she’s turning herself into a Tin Man. Once her heart is made of metal, she’ll no longer miss her beloved dead grandma, her absent dad, or her recently moved-away best friend. 

While Beatrice awaits her transformation, she keeps vigil with a special doll and a handful of wishes she’s determined to make come true. With her encyclopedic knowledge, there must be a way to grant her heart’s deepest desires. 

When an unusual boy named Caleb moves to town and mentions his granny’s interest in magic, Beatrice decides to enlist their help. She quickly learns, however, that spells don’t always go as planned, and witches can’t be trusted. 

With the arrival of an unexpected visitor and a series of otherworldly messages, Beatrice’s plans begin to falter. Will her heart turn into metal? Will any of her wishes come true? 

The Wonderful Wishes of B. is the story of a smart, quirky girl learning what she wants and what she needs—and how, sometimes, the wishes we hold dearest are granted in the most unexpected ways.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Katherin Nolte received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow. Her fiction has appeared in dozens of publications and won multiple awards, but it was a late-night ER visit with her four children that inspired her to write Back to the Bright Before. An Ohio native, she currently lives with her family in Iowa.

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Chapter 1

It all started with Neptune. Not the planet. The cat. Though he wasn’t named Neptune yet. He was just an anonymous kitten stuck in a waterspout, and I was trying to save him. That’s what I told him, too.

“Please stop scratching me,” I said. “I’m trying to save your life.”

It was New Year’s Day. Glad was dead and always would be. That was the truth and a point-blank fact.

Here’s another fact: there are many ways to miss somebody.

You can miss what they looked like, or how they smelled, or the feel of their palm in your hand. You can miss the sound of their voice or the space their life took up in your head. You can miss the notes they left, tucked in your lunch box or slipped in your sock drawer or hidden in the pages of your books.

I missed my grandma Glad all the ways. Every single one of them: all the ways I could think of, and all the ways I couldn’t think of, too.

But back to the kitten.

When I told him I was trying to save his life, either the cat thought I was lying or he didn’t understand. Because he started to scratch me even more, like he was pretending my arm was a scratch-and-sniff sticker, and he wanted to get all the smell out.

What the Cat-Who-Would-Be-Named-Neptune didn’t know, though, was that I was pretending, too. I was pretending his claws weren’t bringing tears to my eyes, that I couldn’t feel the beads of blood sprouting on my wrist.

What Future Planet couldn’t see was that the whole experience--me crouched on the sidewalk in my polka-dot pajamas and fuzzy slippers, arm jammed inside a waterspout--was a good one. It was training for my goal. Which was this:

I wanted to stop feeling.

You know the Tin Man, who wanted a real, beating heart? Well, I was a real, beating girl who wanted to be a Tin Man. Right in the center of my chest is where I wanted to be him, to replace the horrible muscle that pumped and pumped, filling my life with feelings.

I was sick of missing Glad, sick of all my other feelings, too. So I’d decided to do something about it.

See, what I imagined was my heart, all stretched out and bumpy. The bumps were my feelings. Every time I didn’t cry or wince or think, I wish I could see her again, it was like I was taking a mallet and hitting one of those bumps. The more times I hit, the smoother my heart got, till one day, it wouldn’t be muscle anymore, but perfectly flat, like a sheet of metal. Goodbye, heart. Hello, Tin Man.

I got down on my stomach and pressed my face to the waterspout. Two eyes shone back.

“You think you’re hurting me,” I told the eyes, “but really you’re helping me. The more you scratch, the less I feel. The less I feel, the more metallic I become.”

The kitten hissed.

“I’ve got all day,” I told him. “I have absolutely nowhere to go.”

“Who you talkin’ to?” a voice asked.

Unfortunately, the voice did not belong to the kitten.

I stayed on my stomach, eye pressed to the metal spout. The voice belonged to a boy. Maybe, I thought, if I lie here and don’t say anything, the voice will go away. I decided to count to twenty in my head. One . . . two . . .

“Why aren’t you answerin’ me?” the voice asked.

Three . . . four . . .

“Can’t you hear?”

The voice was kind of rude. Five . . . six . . .

“What you lookin’ at?”

Seven . . .

“Can I see it?”

It was also rather annoying. Eight . . . nine . . .

“You might cut yourself. That metal looks sharp.”

Ten . . .

“Rusty, too. I bet you’ll get tetanus.”

The voice was a bit of a worrywart. Eleven . . . twelve . . .

“Your whole face will fall off. Green slime’ll leak from your eyes.”

The voice didn’t know much about infections. Thirteen . . . fourteen . . .

“Well, I tried bein’ nice to you. I guess I’ll have to be mean instead.”

Fifteen . . . sixteen . . .

“I’m gonna kick you.”

The voice was violent. Seventeen . . .

“As hard as I can. And that’s really hard because I’m superstrong.”

The voice was very violent. Eighteen . . .

“I’m the strongest kid in Ohio. Plus, I got steel-toed boots--with nails stickin’ out the ends.”

Hmm . . . The voice was probably lying. Nineteen . . .

“Okay. You’re gonna regret this. Here I go--”

“Don’t.” I sat up.

The voice was, indeed, a liar. The boy was not wearing steel-toed boots with nails sticking out at the ends. In fact, he wasn’t wearing boots at all. He had on a pair of dirty sneakers with a hole in both toes. I could see his socks.

“You’re a liar,” I told him.

The boy shrugged. “My name’s Caleb Chernavachin,” he said, as if that explained everything, as if a boy named Caleb Chernavachin could not help but be a liar.

I stared at him. His face was round and covered in freckles, like someone had taken a saltshaker full of freckles and shaken them all over his head. He had short, straw-colored hair with long bangs that stuck straight up off his forehead. He wore a puffy winter coat that was so small he couldn’t zip it, and the sleeves came up to his elbows. He was a ridiculous-looking boy. I wanted nothing to do with him.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Beatrice Corwell.”

“Are you ten?”

I nodded.

“So am I,” he said, and tilted back on his heels as if that were really something.

“There are a lot of people in the world who are ten,” I told him. “So, really, we have nothing in common.”

“Yeah, well, my dad is a famous wrestler. So I’m richer than you are.”

“I’m not rich at all.” I lay down again on the sidewalk with my face to the waterspout. “I’m going to get back to saving you as soon as this boy leaves,” I whispered in case the kitten thought I’d forgotten.

Neptune-to-Be hissed.

“Who you talkin’ to?” Caleb asked.

“No one.” I sat up again.

“Why aren’t you wearin’ a coat?”

“It’s bad luck to wear a coat on New Year’s Day.” I don’t know why I said that. I didn’t believe it; I just made it up on the spot. That happened to me a lot. I’d open my mouth, and out would spill words I hadn’t planned to say. It was, my teacher said, a fatal flaw.

The real reason I didn’t have on a coat was because I’d forgotten to put one on when I ran outside. I’d been sitting in Glad’s room, staring at Bright Baby, when I heard the kitten. Despite being on the second floor, I could hear its cry plain as day. (I was a natural-born cat rescuer, which was why I already had seven of them.) So I flew down the staircase--even though it was January and cold as a Popsicle, even though I had on polka-dot pajamas and fuzzy slippers.

Caleb Chernavachin looked at those slippers and said, “You sure are dressed funny.”

I stared at his too-small coat....

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Verlag
Random House Books for Young Readers
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593565142
ISBN 13 
9780593565148
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Purmerul LTD
https://strengholt.nl/en/

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