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Billy Miller Makes a Wish

 I raced through Kevin Henkes's new book yesterday, so these are just some first impressions.

This is a subversive masterpiece. It's about ordinary life. No dragons appear. No geopolitical crises take shape. The book is about a kid awaiting third grade, living in an ordinary town, somewhere in the middle zones of the middle class.

The book seems to be a response to Beverly Cleary; Henkes, who has been compared to the great master, seems to be talking with Ramona, and Willa Jean, and Mrs. Quimby. For example, as Ramona must care for the obnoxious Willa Jean, so Billy must care for his difficult little sister, Sal. As the later Ramona books are about a third child entering the family, so this new Billy book is about a third child entering the family.

Like Cleary, Henkes mixes "inner" moments with striking scenes. Billy makes a wish for something interesting to happen, then guiltily feels he may have willed his neighbor to die. (The neighbor was 93.) Billy gets bored when adults share their sentimental thoughts about childhood; Billy wants to be an adult, and he is in a hurry.

Miscommunications occur; a house starts on fire; a series of embarrassing letters fall into the wrong hands.

Henkes notes--with wonder--changes in the evening sky....and the strangeness of seeing a bat in your basement....and the little sounds a grocery-store "mist-machine" makes, just as it switches from "off" to "on."

I don't know if people have the ability to read, right now; life is so crappy for everyone in the pandemic. But this is a brisk, hopeful, smart book--and it might take you out of the present, even as the present continues to be a pain in the ass. It's that good.
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