The Wishing Game

Content Warning: This section discusses child abuse, childhood trauma, and child sexual assault in direct reference to events occurring in the narrative.

Throughout most of the novel, the text challenges the idea that adults who have children biologically are necessarily adequate parents and that misgivings about adoption are dubious and often unfounded. The novel creates a dichotomy between the characters along this line, often portraying biological parents, like Lucy’s or Autumn’s, in the worst light imaginable, while depicting adults who wish to become parents through adoption, like Lucy and Jack, as having the qualities of nurturing and protective parents. In addition, Jack’s character arc is a reaction to his own parents’ failings. As a survivor of child abuse, he knows the horrors of being tied to an alcohol-dependent and violent father and the helplessness of being a child in such a situation. The text highlights this persistent terror in how Jack describes his father:

‘Jack’s father was an alcoholic. He said it was like growing up with a werewolf. When he was a normal man, he was all right, he was […] human. When he was drinking, he turned into a monster, just like that.