Gooseblog: Goosebumps #12: Be Careful What You Wish For...

Make a wish, everybody! It's time to cover the twelfth goosebumps book. It's time to Be Careful What You Wish For... AKA Don't accept magic from jerks.

COVER STORY

This is the other Non-Jacobus cover, and ooh boy is it bad. There's way too much black, the face of Sam Byrd looks really weird and bloated looking. everything just looks kind of rushed and lacks a real engaging feel to it. I can see why after this cover they stuck with Jacobus for the majority of Goosebumps art.

STORY

Our protagonist is Samantha (Sam) Byrd. She's you average lanky and clumsy 12-year old girl. She plays basketball for her school team, but is so much of a klutz that she usually fails. She's also constantly mocked by a girl named Judith, who likes to taunt her by saying "Why don't you fly away, Byrd?" Judith particularly enjoys targeting Sam. Spilling tapioca on her shoes in Home Ec, then later kneeing Sam in the gut super hard during a dive for a basketball. After that bad day of school, Sam drives off into the woods, and runs into a strange old lady. She decides to interact with the old woman, and learns that the woman's name is Clarissa. After helping her with directions, Clarissa says that she wants to repay Sam by way of giving her three wishes.

At first Sam thinks that Clarissa is just some insane old lady, but Clarissa soon whips out a crystal ball. Sam muddles about for her first wish, then says that she wishes to be the strongest player on her team. She goes home and plays ball with her brother Ron to practice. She still sucks, which makes her doubt the wish stuff. She gets annoyed and wishes Ron to be a foot tall. She thinks the wish came true, but somehow she mistook her brother for her pet dog. Because logic. The next day comes and Sam does get her wish. But since this is one of those monkey paw type stories, she ends up being still being klutzy, but now everyone else is even worse, causing them to lose their game. It turns out that everyone is sick but Sam. Judith and another girl named Anna get sick to the point of being out for a week,  which is enough for Judith to accuse Sam of being a witch, putting some sort of curse on them. I mean, she's not wrong on this...

Angered by this (technically kind of true) accusation, Sam wishes that Judith would just disappear. Somehow Clarissa twists this to make everyone in he world disappear except for Sam. She runs around town trying to find any signs of life, but to no avail. Nobody is alive, except for Clarissa of course. Clarissa tells her that yes, she made Judith disappear, but magic is unpredictable and kind of made sure everyone else vanished too. Sam makes her third wish, to fix everything, but to make Judith think that she's the greatest person ever. It turns out that Sam's kind of stupid. She could have had a quick fix, but instead this wish just turns Judith into a full on Single White Female. She cuts her hair like Sam's, wants to dress like her, constantly at her side no matter what, giving Sam zero privacy. Judith's fixation gets to Sam so badly that she secretly longs for the days when she used to bully her. Sam wants out of this wish, so Clarissa actually gives her a mulligan. One extra wish.

TWIST ENDING

Sam's final wish is that she wishes that she never met Clarissa, and instead that it was Judith that met her. Everything goes back to normal, but when she runs into Judith the next day, Judith wishes that "you'd just fly away, Byrd". We then get some narration from Sam, who talks about how it feels to eat worms, and to fly into the sky with her wings. Yep. One final twist of the knife by Clarissa sees Sam spend the rest of her days as a bird. Maybe she should have just wished for a turkey sandwich. I mean, at least the turkey would just be a little dry...

CONCLUSION

I don't know how to feel about Be Careful What You Wish For. It's not the most meaty, nor the most engaging book in the Goosebumps series. In fact, it's the densest book so far with really not much to talk about. It's only real scare factor is the wish where everyone vanishes, and that does feel like the most tense the book gets. It's paced well enough too, never feeling like there's much wasted space. So, maybe I just don't like how mean spirited this book feels overall. Sam really didn't do anything to deserve what she got, and in the end it's the bully who gets the happy ending. I get that it's a monkey's paw type story, but I dunno. It kind of makes it hard to get into this story when you realize that your main character is going to get unfairly treated for the whole book. Maybe that's why the episode changes things around, turning Judith into a statue instead for the ending. At least there, Sam gets some sort of win.  But then again, the title is Be Careful What Your Wish For, and if Sam got everything she truly wished for, it would be devoid of the consequence needed for a title like that. I get that. It just leaves me feeling really conflicted. I guess I can rationalize it somehow. Maybe Clarissa just specializes in the wishes where you get jerked around.

Be Careful What You Wish For... gets a C.