If Wishes Were Retail by Auston Habershaw Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, magical realism
Pages: 256
Published by Tachyon Publications on June 17, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
In this hilarious debut fantasy cozy, a rebellious—but enterprising—young woman and an ancient—but clueless—genie set up shop at the local mall.
Alex Delmore needs a miracle. She wants out of her dead-end suburban town, but her parents are broke and NYU seems like a distant dream.
Good thing there’s a genie in town—and he’s hiring at the Wellspring Mall.
It’d help if the Jinn-formerly-of-the-Ring-of-Khorad knew even one thing about 21st-century America. It’d help if he weren’t at least as stubborn as Alex. It’d really help if her brother didn’t sell her out to her conspiracy theory-loving, gnome-hating dad.
When Alex and the genie set up their wishing kiosk, they face seemingly-endless setbacks. The mall is failing and management will not stop interfering on behalf of their big-box tenants.
But when the wishing biz might start working, the biggest problem of all remains: People are really terrible at wishing.
My Review:
I picked this one up for the cover. I mean that seriously. Who could resist that genie? And then there’s the premise of the whole thing. It does sound like it should be farcical. And it kind of is – at least at first.
And also from a certain point of view, which kind of flips in the middle – as does Alex Delmore’s perspective on the genie. And eventually, on everything else in her life.
At first this is a story about a disaffected teenager looking for a way out from a dead end town and the totally dysfunctional family that seems to be doing its damndest – both by deliberate intention and by merely being who they are – to keep her mired in the same no hope future that they have condemned themselves to – whether intentionally or just by bad luck and worse choices.
The genie looks like Alex’s way out. Either by granting her wish to GET OUT, or by employing her so she can earn enough money to pay her own way out. At seventeen, marching to the beat of a much different drummer from seemingly everyone else in town, prickly and quirky and intelligent and too used to being alone after COVID’s imposed isolation to pretend otherwise, Alex doesn’t even see anyone or anything she’ll miss when she leaves. Not even her family.
She doesn’t know what the genie’s getting out of his strange stab at retail, and in the beginning she doesn’t care about that, either. He’s her ticket out – if she can just keep him in business long enough for her to earn it.
Alex can easily see that the genie needs her help. The rules of social behavior have changed rather a lot in the millennia he’s been trapped in his ring. So she’s teaching him the rudiments of not getting arrested in 21st century suburbia and he’s teaching her a lesson that he’s learning as he goes.
He’s there to help others – he’s just really, really bad at it. Or is he? At first we see humans being humans, mostly wishing for things they want and not articulating what they need. Including Alex, even if it’s just in the confines of her own frustrated psyche.
Which is when the story flips perspectives. The humans are stuck making a whole lot of terrible and destructive wishes because that’s what we’ve been taught – to believe that something outside us will make us happy. The genie isn’t getting the fulfillment and respect he craves because he knows they’re wishing for the wrong thing. He even knows what they should be wishing for – he just doesn’t grasp that he now has the free will to truly help.
When Alex convinces him that what he needs to do is put on his big genie pants and grant the wish in people’s hearts instead of the wish coming out of their mouths, everything changes. Including Alex. Not what she wants, not what she needs, but her perspective on what she already has.
Escape Rating B: This wasn’t anything like I expected from either the blurb or the cover. Or the picture in my own head. I was hoping for a bit of Robin Williams’ fast-talking genie from Aladdin, because the idea of THAT in a typical shopping mall would be screamingly funny.
Although it wouldn’t have as much heart as this book turned out to have.
In the beginning, the genie is a huge, floundering fish-out-of-water. But so is Alex, although not nearly as physically huge even though her floundering creates just as much of a splash. That mall is not the right setting for either of them – but it is a stepping stone in ways that I didn’t expect.
There is a lot of fun, more than a bit of farce, and a surprisingly huge helping of the movie Office Space in the first half of Wishes, as Alex and the genie navigate the endless red tape of operating a kiosk in a moribund shopping mall in a dying town. The world is way different than the genie remembers, the operators of the mall and the folks in town are way more suspicious of anything strange or foreign than even Alex imagined, and the roadblocks to granting people wishes get bigger every day.
And that’s before the story opens the whole gnome can of tiny, oppressed workers who are maintaining the mall AND the town under terrible working conditions for no pay whatsoever.
The place that this story ultimately went was one that I didn’t expect it to go at all. Because in the end, this is a story about community and how we’ve abandoned so many of the things that make a community in our pursuit of more, More, MORE.
So, what ended up in my head, surprising me even as I was still laughing out the gnomes – because yes, there really are gnomes underfoot the whole time – was the quote from Babylon 5 (see, there is some SF here amongst the fantasy) that “everywhere humans go, they create communities out of diverse and sometimes hostile populations. It is a great gift and a terrible responsibility, one that cannot be abandoned.” The whole story in If Wishes Were Retail is that humans are abandoning that responsibility and the genie helps them get just a tiny piece of it back, in exactly the kind of place we seem to be abandoning everywhere – a shopping mall.
