You know what they say about wishing....

Don't You Wish is a fresh and enjoyable YA novel with romance, teen angst, fantasy and science fiction elements. The neat thing about it is that when I first started reading it, I thought, “Ah, I see where this is all going…” and I thought that I could pretty much tell the story myself without even finishing it. As I continued reading it, though, I was happily surprised as the plot took on a unique direction and the author didn’t spend any time rehashing what has been done in so many other books.

Annie Nutter is an “invisible” at South Hills High School, a fictional school in Pittsburgh. In my mind I imagined it as a Bethel or South Park (one of the things I liked about the book was that it was set, a little bit, in my hometown of Pittsburgh, PA). She plays in the orchestra, gets good grades, gets picked on here and there by the A Listers, has a best friend, an annoying little brother and good parents. Her life is pretty ordinary. Her folks aren’t rich and they struggle with money, like most folks. One day Annie sees her mom looking at an architectural magazine in Walmart and notices that she is crying. When she asks her mother why, her mom shows her the magazine’s article on a beautiful mansion in Miami. Mrs. Nutter explains that the man who owns the mansion, Jim Monroe, is a plastic surgeon who now owns a franchise of walk-in cosmetic surgery centers. He was her boyfriend in college and she could have married him instead of Annie’s father, who is a manager at the local Radio Shack and a wannna-be inventor.

Annie wonders if she would still exist if her mother had married the doctor. Would she be the rich daughter of her mother and this doctor, living in Miami, going to all of the glamorous parties in SoBe? What would that life be like?

With the help of a thunderstorm, her father’s latest failed invention and quantum physics, Annie gets to find out. She wakes up in the body of Ayla Monroe, the daughter of her mother and the rich doctor.

The book could have gone in all kinds of stereotypical directions, but it doesn’t, instead, it really gets into the head of Annie/Ayla and the other teens in both of her worlds. True the book is about alternative universes and traveling through iPod apps, but really, it is a realistic portrayal of teen social culture and I recommend it!