Don't You Wish

Don't You Wish, by Roxanne St. Clair.

"So don't even think about it again," she says. "Because you are who you are meant to be. Annie Nutter, daughter of Mel and Emily Nutter."

"But you don't know, Mom. What if I were the daughter of Jim and Emily Monroe? What if you'd had a daughter with a different husband? Who knows if I would still be me?"

"That's a silly question."

Is it? Would I play the violin? Would I have my same lousy hair but pretty blue eyes? Would I still love Jolly Ranchers and SpongeBob, or would I be too rich and cool for candy and old-school cartoons? Would Lizzie be my BFF? Would Theo still gross me out? Would I still be the poster child for the website My Life is Average? Or worse? I think not.

"If you even existed," Mom says. "You'd be somebody else entirely if you had different parents."

"But wouldn't I have the same soul?"

Mom looks at me, her eyes clear now, but still mascara-smudged. "I have no idea. Nobody can answer that question."

But I think about it all the way home.

Although this book was fairly predictable, I definitely had a fun time reading it, and in fact devoured it in a day. Annie Nutter is a plain high school student - she wears braces and doesn't always have the best hair days - and her mom is a real estate agent and her dad is an inventor. She also has a little brother, Theo, who can be annoying at times. One day, her mom shows her an architecture magazine with a picture of an enormous, beautiful house, and the owner is Jim Monroe, a billionaire whom her mom used to date before marrying her dad. Her mom wonders if life would have been different if she was Mrs. Monroe, rich heiress; Annie does as well.

Annie is playing with her dad's latest invention one night, a mirror that helps you envision your "perfect self," and she gets electrocuted or something while doing it. When she wakes up, she's no longer Annie Nutter: she's Ayla Monroe, daughter of Jim Monroe (though she has the same mother, albeit one who is flawless-looking and 15 pounds skinnier than her "old mom" was). At first, Annie (Ayla) loves being popular, but she soon realizes that this life isn't all it's cracked up to be, and she wants to return to her old life as Annie Nutter; she just needs to find a way back.

This book has been optioned as a film, and I think it could make a great movie for teens. There are a lot of great supporting characters in the novel, like Charlie, a "nerd" that Annie meets while Ayla who tries to help her get "home" to her "real reality"; his theory is that there are multiple realities out there. Even though Annie likes a lot of the perks in Ayla's life, like the Aston Martin she drives and huge mansions she lives in, she realizes that she was happier when she had her "normal" family, which is why she wants to return to that life.

I also loved the ending - I had a feeling it would be one of those "deus ex machina" types, where it might say something like "And then she woke up and it was all a dream"; however, it definitely doesn't do that, and in fact leaves the reader wondering how much of it was real, and also how many "realities" there can be in a person's life, depending on decisions that they or others make.

4 stars out of 5.

*Disclosure: I received an e-galley of this book from NetGalley to review. The opinions expressed here, however, are my own.