By Laurel Snyder
Rebecca's mother drives her away from her father in the middle of the night, and in her grandmother's attic she finds a bread box that grants any wish small enough to fit inside it.
It starts with a car. Rebecca is twelve, and one night her mother has had enough of her father and packs Rebecca and her toddler brother Lew into the car and drives from Baltimore to Atlanta, to Gran's house, and that's it, that's the divorce, no meeting, no explanation, no vote. In the attic Rebecca finds an old bread box, and it turns out that if she wishes for something and the thing would fit inside, the thing is there when she lifts the lid. An iPod. Good clothes. French fries from her favorite place back home. Money. She gets popular at her new school on the strength of it. The one wish she wants is the one that will never fit in a bread box, which is her family back in one house, and the book is honest about that from the start. Then she finds out where the things in the box have been coming from, and she finds out in front of everybody.
The magic is real, which is what makes this land instead of preach. Rebecca isn't imagining the bread box and she isn't learning that wishes are silly. She gets a working magic box and it still cannot do the only thing she needs, and the book makes her live in the gap between those two facts for two hundred pages. That's the shape of a child's actual experience of a separation, wanting one specific outcome with your whole body and having no lever anywhere that reaches it. What Snyder does with it is braver than most: she lets Rebecca be furious at her mother and unfair about it, lets her use the box selfishly, lets her steal without quite admitting to herself that's what it is, and lets it blow up publicly. She's not a nice girl having a hard time. She's a girl behaving badly because behaving badly is the only power she's got left, which is a thing a child in the middle of this recognizes and rarely gets to see on a page.