by Janette Rallison
ages: 12+
First sentence: “I would have expected to see this sort of line if, say, Elvis had returned from the dead to give a concert.”
Review copy received from the publisher.

Annika Truman is not used to losing and, generally, will stop at nothing to get what she wants. Her little brother, Jeremy has been diagnosed with cancer and is going to undergo surgery in a week. She wants — desperately — for him to come through okay, so she invents a “genie” that will grant three wishes. She expects him to ask for an action figure from his favorite TV show, Teen Robin Hood (that’s what the line was for in the opening sentences), but (surprise!) he wishes for Robin Hood to come and spend a day teaching him archery.

Well, Annika decides that Jeremy must have his wish. So, off she goes to Burbank (and living in Henderson, Nevada, makes it a convenient four hours away) to find the actor, the uber-dreamy Steve Raleigh, and convince him to come spend time with her little brother before he goes into surgery. She has two days. Impossible? Of course not.

Actually, the whole book is impossible. Implausible. Unrealistic. Not-happing-in-anyone’s-lifetime. Real people don’t just drive to California, cleverly weasel their way into basketball stadiums and TV sound lots, happen to run into TV stars (who are all generally nice people… man, I need a sarcasm font), and have everything work out in a nice little package tied up with a green and red plaid bow.

That’s not to say I didn’t love the book. I did. A lot. An absurdly enormous amount, in fact. (Especially absurd considering my age, and the fact that I’m married and have four girls and shouldn’t be fantasizing about running off to California to chase actors. Okay. That was probably more than you needed to know…)

No, I didn’t buy into the fantasy — I knew it was totally unreal — but I bought into the book. There’s enough depth there — Annika’s love for and devotion to her little brother, as well as her struggles with mortality and infinity, for example — to make it less fluffy than it could have been. And it’s quite funny (the part where Annika and Steve were jumping from trailer roof to trailer roof? Hilarious.) And the romance is, well, dreamy. What teenage girl doesn’t dream about being swept off their feet by a movie (okay, TV, star)? Um… I’m sure they’re out there, but I wasn’t one of them. Granted, it all doesn’t wrap up quite so neatly, something which I really appreciated.

And even though it’s a fantasy (realistic fantasy though; there’s no fairy godmothers here), reality did kick in, in the end, just to make sure Annika — and the reader — is still grounded. There’s no happily-ever-afters, no riding off into the sunsets, no perfect sweep us off our feet moments.

Even with all that — the implausibility, the over-the-topness of it all — it was totally and completely worth reading.