Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Instead of Three Wishes: Magical Short Stories
    Instead of Three Wishes: Magical Short Stories
    Instead of Three Wishes: Magical Short Stories
    Ebook136 pages2 hours

    Instead of Three Wishes: Magical Short Stories

    By Megan Whalen Turner

    3.5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    A leprechaun is sighted in small–town New Hampshire. A city boy becomes a hero in prehistoric Sweden. An elf prince tries to reward a girl who wishes he'd just leave her alone. In these and other delightful stories, magical adventure appears in the most unexpected places!

    Instead of Three Wishes is a captivating collection of witty and sparkling fantasy stories from the Newbery Honor author of The Thief.

    Ages 10+

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateSep 22, 2009
    ISBN9780061968419
    Instead of Three Wishes: Magical Short Stories
    Author

    Megan Whalen Turner

    Megan Whalen Turner is the New York Times–bestselling and award-winning author of five stand-alone novels set in the world of the Queen’s Thief. Return of the Thief marks her long-awaited conclusion to the epic and unforgettable story of the thief Eugenides—a story more than twenty years in the making. She has been awarded a Newbery Honor and a Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Young Adult Literature. She has twice been a finalist for the Andre Norton Award and won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature.

    Related to Instead of Three Wishes

    Related ebooks

    Children's Fantasy & Magic For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Broken Wings

      Aug 24, 2020

      Whenever Gemma Faber came to London for work, she stayed at Searle’s. It was a luxurious club-type hotel and every time she visited, she felt she’d really made it. The taxi pulled up and her heart lifted at the sight of the lilac-and-gold striped awn

      5 min read

    • Article

      ‘Cygnet’: Featured Fiction from Season Butler

      Jun 25, 2019

      A excerpt from Butler's debut coming-of-age novel, set in an appealingly rich world with quirky, flawed characters and a dramatic oceanfront landscape. The post ‘Cygnet’: Featured Fiction from Season Butler appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Post Office Hotel, Maude

      Dec 19, 2018

      Post Office Hotel, Maude
      6 min read

    • Article

      A Story for Your Daughters, a Story for Your Sons

      Mar 3, 2020

      The war had closed much of the city, cut off many of the smaller towns. Unable to trace his usual routes, the hat merchant headed into the mountains to try his luck. His father, before he died, had circled a small mountain village on his map, had not

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Man I Should Have Married

      Dec 29, 2019

      The Man I Should Have Married
      11 min read

    • Article

      Too BAD

      Aug 30, 2022

      Too BAD
      6 min read

    • Article

      Tathra Hotel

      May 16, 2018

      Tathra Hotel
      6 min read

    • Article

      Nothing to Declare

      Jun 15, 2019

      All the senior partners were having a laugh about a movie they’d seen. Forty-Five Years. Something, something about the movie taking forty-five years to sit through. The woman McGuinness thought he recognized was in it with them at the far end of the

      24 min read

    • Article

      The Lost Letter

      Jul 2, 2020

      The Lost Letter
      4 min read

    • Article

      Tumblong Tavern

      Oct 20, 2023

      Tumblong Tavern
      8 min read

    • Article

      STRIKE IT RICH ... With This Gem

      Oct 15, 2020

      STRIKE IT RICH ... With This Gem
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Traveler

      Oct 1, 2020

      The Traveler
      7 min read

    • Article

      Always Home

      Feb 25, 2023

      Tennessee was the only home I’d ever known. I never imagined leaving. But my wife and I were planning a move to Michigan to be closer to our grandchildren, and I was packing up my vendor stall at my very last Tennessee craft show. I was sure I could

      4 min read

    • Article

      Happy Imperfect New Year

      Dec 1, 2020

      Happy Imperfect New Year
      6 min read

    • Article

      A Pub At Woodstock

      Dec 23, 2021

      A Pub At Woodstock
      8 min read

    • Article

      Marco

      Mar 1, 2022

      THE ALLEY STANK . Marco could feel the damp soaking into his tunic as he pressed his back against the wall, trying to seem like part of the shadows. He cursed himself. How could he have been so stupid? He knew if he stayed out after dark they might f

      6 min read

    • Article

      Werrimull Hotel Vic

      Mar 13, 2019

      Werrimull Hotel Vic
      6 min read

    • Article

      All Of Us Here

      Jun 4, 2020

      All Of Us Here
      6 min read

    • Article

      Stonehenge

      Jul 11, 2023

      Stonehenge
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Beach Hut

      Mar 29, 2022

      The Beach Hut
      5 min read

    • Article

      Cleaning the Step

      Jan 4, 2024

      Ada waits until they’ve all gone – to school, to work if they’re lucky, to fritter away their pensions in the betting shop or sit in the sad little café on the main road, nursing cups of tea and remembering. Better to wait out of sight. Not everyone

      6 min read

    • Article

      Getaway Driver

      Feb 10, 2022

      Getaway Driver
      11 min read

    • Article

      Marmalade SUMMER

      Sep 1, 2022

      Marmalade SUMMER
      5 min read

    • Article

      Women and Men Made of Them

      Sep 15, 2019

      Mary Ann lived near me in Baton Rouge, then she was in Memphis. She’d told me they could never return. Return to this life, she meant. Her husband, Knox, I’d hated, and he’d been called, of all things, a kind man. People called him good, gentlemanly,

      14 min read

    • Article

      The Song Of Songs

      Mar 8, 2022

      The Song Of Songs
      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Instead of Three Wishes

    3.5/5

    73 ratings4 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      Overall Rating: 3/5
      Megan Whalen Turner’s The Queen’s Thief series is, without a doubt, one of the best things I’ve ever read. By the middle of book three, The King of Attolia, I had already decided to add her to my list of favorite authors on goodreads.

      However, the best thing about those books is, by far, the characters. Turner has a knack for great, multi-dimensional characters the way Brandon Sanderson has a knack for cool magic systems, or the way Patrick Rothfuss has a knack for pretty words, or the way that Gene Wolfe has a knack for world building. It is her strongest trait by far. Which is not to say that those books don’t have decent world-building, lore, and plots behind them, because they do, but they’re just regular good.

      I was very excited when I found out that Turner had a short story collection I could read, though now that I’ve read it I realize that her strongest trait, character, is something that typically takes a back seat in short stories so that unique ideas, plots, or styles of writing can take center stage. There’s simply not enough words in a short story to develop strong characters (usually), but the length is perfect for experimentation in other areas.

      These stories, unfortunately, are not at all experimental. They’re charming, but woefully predictable, and they all wrap up a little too cleanly for my taste. I would say that the majority of short stories I've read have at least somewhat ambiguous endings, and that's probably for the best. You can get away with stuff you otherwise couldn't, so why not take advantage of that? We really don't like ambiguous endings in western culture, but somehow that type of ending thrives in short stories and that's a big part of why I'm drawn to them.

      A Plague of Leprechaun (1/5)
      Tourist start flocking to a small town when a leprechaun is sighted. An artist visiting to paint landscapes gets the gold. Quite boring.

      Leroy Roachbane (1/5)
      Some kid likes to kill roaches to an unhealthy degree. He has to write a report about his black heritage for school, but he lives in Sweden and the school library only has history books about white people. He crashes his bike and has some sort of hallucination about killing roaches for ancient Swedish tribal people or something. What the shit? Seriously, what the shit?

      Factory (4/5)
      This is a great little story about a sort of dystopian future where people sleep, eat, live, and work for fourteen hours a day in a giant factory. Work is apparently so scarce that there is a selection process to get in, if you can believe it. The main character, John, due to the results of his psych profile, which indicate he's a loner, is assigned to the 'high crane' where he is isolated from most of the other workers. In fact, it takes him so long to climb up and down the ladder to his crane that he very quickly stops climbing down to take his lunch breaks at all, which further isolates him from the rest of the workers.

      At first he enjoys his job, doesn't mind being alone at all, and loves reading the books the factory library provides. He hears rumors of how the previous workers in his position have quit after a short time because they saw ghosts. The official story from the factory, however, is that they quit “because they got bored and lonely.”

      At first he ignores these rumors, but eventually he meets one of these ghosts and forms a friendship with her. Turns out she's one of the people who lived in a mansion on this plot of land a long time ago, before the factory was built.

      They share poetry, she tells him what nature in her time was like (John's people call pigeons 'birds' because 'there's only the one kind' and he's never heard of a squirrel).

      They become really close and he comes to realize that he would rather live in her world, a world that never changes, than grow old and leave her, and so he talks to her mother (who is the one who figured out how to ghost-ify the whole family in the first place) and does exactly that, bringing not only himself but a ton of new books and chocolates into his new friend's unchanging world where they can sit and read and eat chocolate together for all eternity.

      It's short, sweet, character-driven, and speaks to what is truly important in life (relationships with other people, ideas, contentment, happiness) vs. what really isn't important at all but a lot of people really think is incredibly important (forward progress, manufacturing, profit, money, work work work and more work). It really resonated with me and my own personal world-view and I enjoyed it immensely.

      Aunt Charlotte and the NGA Portraits (3/5)
      An old woman tells a story from her youth, about how she befriended this older woman during a vacation who was magical. At the end she gets sent into a painting to retrieve a fur coat for said woman and meets several people who are, in actual fact, not real but people from several different paintings. Basically it's her way of explaining why she sees certain painting as friends, and what parts of it you choose to believe are up to you, as aunt Charlotte would say.

      Instead of Three Wishes (4/5)
      The 'title track' of this collection if you will, this story is yet again a sweet, character-driven story that shows off Turner's strengths.

      It all starts when a young woman named Selene helps an elf prince cross the street. He, as elves do, offers her a gift in exchange for her help—three wishes, printed on business cards—which she promptly refuses because he could be a crazy murderer or something, and besides, how often do wishes go so very wrong in stories? She accidentally tells him where she lives in her attempt to escape the situation and receives gift upon gift at her doorstep, all of which she refuses for reasons of practicality and common sense. A mansion she can't afford to live in; a fairy tale prince meant to be her husband who can't read, write, or do anything useful; etc.

      Finally, not knowing how to please her, the elf prince disguises himself as a human and takes up lodging in Selene and her mother's house in order to find out what she likes so that he can repay his debt. Turns out a nice lodger was exactly what they wanted, and Selene's delicious baking is exactly what the elf prince wanted. The three of them slowly become friends, and when Selene gets accepted into an exclusive culinary school that she can't afford to go to the elf prince knows exactly what to do. He pays her tuition, and moves Selene's mother into his own house where his mother lives.

      What started as a single-minded, almost business-like attempt to repay a debt ends with Selene being able to go to the culinary school of her dreams, and her, her mother, the elf prince and his mother, all becoming good friends. Just like Factory it emphasizes the importance of friendships and other people over material goods. Selene chose to make new friends instead of making three wishes, and she was smarter than most of us for doing so.

      The Nightmare (2/5)
      Some high-school freshman harasses a woman who throws something at him. Turns out it's a nightmare that he has every night of what the people he saw throughout the day think of him. It turns him into a better, more empathetic individual and at the end of the story he passes it on to someone else, just as the woman did to him.

      The Baker King (3/5)
      A charming story written like a fairy tale, but a fairy tale that seems...perhaps a little too familiar? Basically a king sends his son off somewhere to learn the ways of life, but dies before he tells anyone where the boy actually is. His ministers manage just fine without a king until an infamous bandit sends word that he'll be taking up the position, whether they like it or not. They realize they can't call upon the army without a royal decree. One minister decides to find a random young man who fits the lost heir's description and tries to convince him that he is, in fact, the king. Turns out the man he picked actually is the lost heir, and knows that he is, but he doesn't want to be king. He pretends as much as he needs to in order to convince everyone that the throne is cursed and will kill anyone who sits on it besides the true heir, which scares away the bandits, and then returns to being a baker's apprentice while the ministers go back to running things.
    • 4/5
      Charming. Maybe only 3.5 stars though. Very quick read, but not just for young children. Again, it's an anthology, so it's a mixed bag, and the rating reflects an average of how much I liked the stories.
    • 2/5
      Cute little short stories that left me smiling (no teeth) for a second. The endings to some of the stories were too mild for me.
    • 4/5
      Turner has a firm grasp on the matter of fact style that makes fairy tales so delicious. Skip the first story when you first read. In fact, go straight to Aunt Charlotte and the NGA Portraits, my favourite.

    Book preview

    Instead of Three Wishes - Megan Whalen Turner

    A Plague of Leprechaun

    Tuesday morning, the North Twicking Times of North Twicking, New Hampshire, ran a story on a leprechaun recently sighted by James Fairsidle on his way down to his south field. North Twicking was a town of Irish descent and Fairsidle was a man who’d always longed to see a leprechaun, certain that he could bully the little beggar into releasing his treasure. Now he had seen one, and he had the broken wrist to prove it, having fallen over a stone in his hurry to catch hold of the little green man. As a result, he’d be hiring Patrick Whelan to do his spring plowing for him. He came into Mrs. Malleaster’s tavern very grumpy about the whole business and claimed that the leprechaun had magicked the stone under his feet. As this contravened the well-ordered rules of leprechauns, he found very little sympathy among the other midday tavern-goers.

    You’d have done better to keep you mouth shut about the whole business instead of letting the entire world in on what a fool you were, said Mag Malleaster. I don’t know why you did such a silly thing.

    Because Rob down at the paper gives a pretty good fee to anyone who brings in a story, that’s why, said Fairsidle. That money is the only good thing to come out of this business.

    Wouldn’t surprise me if it was, muttered Mag, wiping down the bar. This time tomorrow we’ll be overrun.

    I thought you’d like the business, Mag.

    I would if they would come one after another like decent tourists. I’ve only got six rooms in the inn, haven’t I? Mark my words, they’ll all be here together, and just as we’ve ordered in enough beer to keep ’em, they’ll all be gone and leave nothing behind but the undrunk Guinness I have to pay for.

    North Twicking did its best to prepare, but by the next afternoon there were more leprechaun hunters than you could shake a stick at. They came from near and from far. A cowboy came all the way from Kingsville, Texas. There were old ones and young ones and single ones and ones that brought along their entire families. Mag’s inn was filled. The only empty room she had was one that had been reserved several weeks earlier, and she’d been offered a great deal of money by a number of people if she would just cancel that reservation and let them have the room. Each time she’d said no, but it made her hot under the collar to turn down money, and as the day passed, she got more and more snappish. The regulars in the tavern looked carefully into their beers and only spoke when ordering a new round.

    But, madam, one of the visitors pointed out, leprechauns are good luck.

    No, said Mag, "leprechauns are lucky. You don’t get good luck without bad, and I’ll tell you which kind those little men like to hand out."

    Right she was. By the end of the week, all the milk in the county was running sour. The cows closest to North Twicking were the worst. Saturday afternoon the water main in town burst, and folks had to carry their water from the town well. Sunday the Holbins’ barn caught fire, and they were lucky to get the animals safely out before it burned to the ground. These were just the larger disasters. Marjorie Sities turned her ankle, Caleb Bates’s car got flats in all its tires one right after the other, and Jamie Walsh woke up Monday morning to find that his prize black Angus were scattered all over the Twicking Hills. Mixed in with these events were the six or seven search parties that had to be organized to hunt down missing tourists and their children, all of whom claimed to have been led off by the leprechaun.

    Monday afternoon, a young man with a knapsack and a black briefcase walked into the tavern and asked if Mrs. Malleaster was the proprietress of the hotel.

    Mag finished pouring the pint she was working on and stared at the bar a moment before she answered. She was, in general, fair-minded, congenial, and kind. Her customers liked her and she made a reasonable living with her tavern. Still, North Twicking got very few out-of-town visitors, it being much less accessible than South Twicking, located on the highway fifteen miles down the valley. It fairly made her blood boil to have so many potential customers and to have to turn them away. She reached for a slip of paper and slid it across the bar to the young man.

    We’re all full up here. That’s a list of families who will rent space to visitors, but I’ll warn you that the town water main is burst and you won’t be able to get a bath at any of ’em. You can use my phone to call around and see who’s got room. She turned back to the tap and began filling the next pint.

    The young man looked a little stunned, as well he might. He lowered his briefcase to the floor and sidled closer to the bar. Uh, I don’t mean to be rude, but my name is Roger Otterly, and I think I have a room here. I did make a reservation and, uh, I did pay in advance.

    Oh, good heavens! Mag put the mug down on the bar half full. What must you think of us? Yes, of course I have your room. She called over her one waitress and said, Jen, keep an eye on the bar. I’m going to take this young man up to his room. It’s right this way, sir.

    As she preceded him up the narrow stairs to the second floor, she explained that it was the only room left in the hotel since the leprechaun sighting had brought so many people to town, and she’d had such difficulties reserving it that she’d forgotten that there was a person she was reserving it for. That little man has brought us more difficulties than blessings, and that’s the truth, she said. But Roger Otterly didn’t seem much interested in the leprechaun. After pointing out the bath at the end of the hall and reassuring him that the inn pumped water from its own well and water supply was not a problem, Mag headed back to the tavern.

    Just as she reached the stairs, however, Roger Otterly poked his head out of his room and asked, I’m sorry, did you say that there were a lot of people visiting because of this, um, leprechaun person?

    Yes. You might say they were thicker than currants in pudding. Is that a problem? she asked when she saw the downcast expression on the young man’s face.

    Roger stepped around the edge of the doorway and stood with his hands in his pockets as he explained. I’m an artist, you see. Anyway, I’ve just gotten out of art school, and I’m sure I’m at the beginning of a long and famous career. He smiled at Mag, and she smiled back. I’ve got no money, but I do have a commission to paint six pictures of some charming countryside for a dentist’s office. They have to be finished by Friday, and North Twicking was supposed to be the charming countryside.

    And you think it won’t be so charming with hordes of picnickers hiking to and fro?

    I’m afraid that’s what the dentist will think. But we’ll just have to hope for the best.

    The next morning, Roger took his briefcase with his paints and canvases and an easel fitted cleverly inside and hiked up a hill. He settled down to work and found everything even worse than he expected. It wasn’t just that there were cars zooming up and down every road in view or that the treasure hunters had left scatterings of trash at every picnic site. These things could be carefully left out of a painting. No, Roger’s biggest problem was the treasure hunters themselves, who insisted on stopping to look over his shoulder and distract him from his work with comments like Gosh that’s good, are you an artist? or worse, I’m a bit of an artist myself, and I think you’ve got the wrong color on that barn there. He tried moving to more and more isolated places, but there was nowhere isolated enough with a leprechaun hunt going on. Finally he packed up his paints and went back to the Jaunty Fox for his lunch. He spent the rest of the afternoon in the tavern.

    The regulars made room for him happily enough, but after an hour or two they sent Mag over with a beer and a question. She leaned over the table and asked quietly, Rog, they want to know why you’re staring at them. When there was no response to her question, she nudged him sharply with an elbow. Have you never seen men drink beer before?

    Roger flushed cadmium red to his hairline and stammered, I don’t have a sketchbook with me. I’m always forgetting it. So I have to memorize what people look like in order to draw them later.

    Meg looked down at a number of rough sketches on a cocktail napkin. Can you do that? Keep a picture in your head and draw it later?

    Well, yes, like I said, I’m always forgetting my sketchpad, so I’ve had lots of practice. That man with the enormous mole, for instance, I could probably wait a year and still draw it.

    Well, better leave James and his mole off your sketchpad. It might end a budding career. I will tell the other patrons that you’re not trying to put the hex on any of them. I don’t suppose they mind being models for a great artiste. She winked and went away.

    She was right. They were all quite flattered. They invited Roger over and asked him about the artist’s life, and after that nobody minded if he got a little unfocused in the middle of a conversation. This was quite a good thing because Roger spent all of Wednesday in the tavern as well. He talked to the customers and sketched rough reminders on Mag’s napkins until she supplied him with a telephone pad to work on. While he talked, Jamie Walsh was out looking for his cows again and the Boswells’ pigs were running loose as well, mostly through the Sites’ cabbage. Two more search

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1