Matthew Ross Smith

The story is cute: hard work a little bit of random magic = all your dreams come true? You have to be ok with the magic being the most convenient method to move the story from point to point and literally doing nothing else, and then you find a tale of a young girl who works her rear off and just needs a little bit of help to move past all the realistic roadblocks standing in the way of her dreams. Her dreams actually come true, and she finds out that everything that comes with it is not at all what she wants and that she feels a little guilty about how it all went down, so she tries to find a way around the guilt but ends up reversing her fortunes and coming back to reality, a little older, a little wiser, and still in love with basketball - it’s about as neat and tidy a story as you could want.
It’s a little bland, but not unpleasant. I thought the 3rd person interview style chapters were kind of weird and stunted the flow of the story, but I did like toward the end, where the other characters outside perception of Lizzy was offset by her revealing how she really felt.
The thing I especially didn’t like, but don’t figure most anyone else will care about, was some of the language. It was definitely mild from an adult perspective, but peppered in were complaints about somebody bitching, and lots and lots of the use of “god” along with a couple other words that aren’t allowed in our house, especially among our kids, so that ended up being the most negative thing about the book as a whole.… (mehr)