Twenty Wishes

The premise is plain, almost disarmingly so: a circle of widows on Blossom Street decide, on Valentine’s Day, to write down twenty wishes apiece—some practical, some private, some so small they look trivial until the novel shows how a person returns to herself through repetition and habit. Anne Marie Roche, a bookstore owner still living in the shadow of loss, becomes the book’s most sustained center, and Macomber uses her to explore how grief can harden into routine long after the funeral flowers are gone. What emerges is not a story about getting over the dead, but about making room for the living again, one wish at a time.

Macomber’s strongest scenes are the quiet ones, especially when women talk to one another without the novel feeling the need to decorate the exchange. The friendship among the widows has a cumulative warmth; it is built from errands, confidences, and the kind of practical kindness that fiction often dismisses as ordinary. That ordinariness is the point. Macomber is interested in recovery as something social rather than solitary, and she gives the book a humane pulse by insisting that women can be changed by companionship without being reduced by it. In that sense, the novel’s emotional architecture is sturdier than its plot mechanics.

The book also works best when it treats the wishes themselves not as a gimmick but as a diagnostic tool. Each list reveals something about the person writing it—what she lacks, what she fears, what she has postponed too long under the pressure of marriage, motherhood, duty, or bereavement. Macomber is good on the gap between aspiration and enactment; a wish for “one good thing about life” is simultaneously modest and severe, an act of moral reorientation disguised as a to-do list. The title, then, is less about magical fulfillment than about the discipline of wanting again, which is a subtler proposition than the novel’s packaging might suggest.

Still, the book has a weakness that is hard to ignore: its structure can feel dutiful where it should feel discovered. Several subplots arrive with the air of being arranged to service a lesson, and the emotional arcs sometimes resolve a little too neatly, as though the novel were reluctant to let grief remain messy for long. Macomber’s earnestness, which is often her virtue, can here flatten complexity; the characters occasionally speak in a manner that serves the theme more than the ear, and the wishes can read less like revelations than like prompts in a workbook. The result is a novel that comforts more readily than it unsettles.

Even so, Twenty Wishes succeeds because it understands that endurance is not a glamorous subject, though it is a necessary one. Macomber gives us women who are not remade in a single epiphany but slowly, through shared meals, small risks, and the insistence that the future is still available. The book’s pleasures are cumulative rather than explosive; they accrue in the way confidence, if it is real, accrues in life. I would not call it a major novel, but I would call it a sincere one, and sincerity, when yoked to craft and restraint, can still carry a surprising amount of force.