If Wishes Were Retail

The AU's Most Anticipated Books of 2025 ""Irresistibly fun and funny, with a ton of heart and depth! This is the kind of book that sneaks up on you and sticks with you!"" --Sarah Beth Durst, New York Times bestselling author of The Spellshop ""Delightfully charming, and it continually surprised me."" --Phil Foglio, co-creator of Girl Genius ""Habershaw (The Iron Ring) offers plenty of laughs in this diverting urban fantasy. After Alexandria Delmore, 17, loses her job at a bagel shop, she sees an ad to be a cashier for a genie who calls himself Mr. Jinn and intends to sell wishes at the Wellspring Mall and applies. Mr. Jinn proves a mercurial boss who's out of date with modern mores and often impulsively abuses his powers, but Alex hopes to get him in line. At first, people are wary of Jinn, but when a video of one of his clients' more malicious wishes coming true goes viral, customers begin trickling in. Jinn's miracles range from the mundane--changing hair colors, healing sunburns, and fixing someone's limp--to grand, including setting up a client with actor Chris Hemsworth, achieving world peace, and curing cancer, but his methods are often unconventional. When the mall gets in trouble for the duo's business of ""warping reality,"" Alex's chances at economic stability and a better future are jeopardized. Even when the consequences of Jinn's actions become dire, Habershaw keeps up the lighthearted, humorous tone. It's a cozy, comical confection."" --Publishers Weekly ""Habershaw's contemporary fantasy adventure is sassy and snarky but with soul. It is 2023, and all 17-year-old Alex Delmore wants is to escape her family and go to college. Her parents are constantly fighting, mostly due to her father being obsessed with conspiracy theories--he thinks gnomes are stealing his landscaping clients--and get-rich-quick schemes. The most recent scheme had such a severe impact on their finances that Alex was told she could not remain unemployed. But finding a job in their small town is not easy, so when she sees an online posting for a sales job with a genie, she is skeptical but desperate enough to take a chance. Turns out the genie is real and recently escaped the ring he had been trapped in for millennia. Now he wants to sell wishes at the local mall, but he needs someone to help him understand the twenty-first century. How Alex learns to deal with an obnoxious being of unlimited cosmic power and gains a better understanding of her fractured family is riotously funny and surprisingly poignant."" --Booklist ""American teen Alex Delmore is embarrassed by her family, hates her dead-end suburban town, and is desperate to get out. Her dream of attending NYU seems to be dead in the water, so she takes a local job helping a genie grant wishes in a dying shopping mall whose red-tape-bound management company seems straight out of Office Space. But the novel is not really about the mall, and it's not even about the genie. It's about community, in the same way that Karin Lin-Greenberg's You Are Here was about the network of character bonds and not the dead shopping mall that hosted them. The genie wants people to make better choices, Alex wants the genie to grant her better options, and, in the end, both learn that what they really need is a clearer picture of what they already have. Readers who like cozy fantasy will be charmed and laugh out loud as Alex tries to teach the genie about life in the 21st century, even as gnomes swoop in and stage a labor dispute that no one saw coming. VERDICT Habershaw's (The Far Far Better Thing) story begins as a bit of a fantasy farce and turns into something heartwarming and cozy."" --Library Journal ""My three wishes? Three more books as good as this one from Auston Habershaw."" --Tom Holt, author of The Eight Reindeer of the Apocalypse ""I wish I'd thought of this."" --Daniel Pinkwater, author of Jules, Penny & the Rooster ""If Wishes Were Retail taps into a long-storied tradition of smart comedic fantasy in the vein of Terry Pratchett...If Wishes Were Retail is a ten out of ten gnomes--if you can see them, that is."" --Mia Tsai, Author of Bitter Medicine ""A love letter to wounded people and community spaces, this suburban fantasy is both delightfully absurd and firmly grounded."" --Dave Klecha, co-author of The Runes of Engagement