A Wish in the Dark by Christina Soontorvat
Born in prison, Pong feels sure he’s destined to remain marginalized and oppressed forever. Life is hard enough in Chattana for former inmates who were legally released, much less for Poing, who escaped from Namwon Prison, leaving his best friend behind and taking with him a persistent guilt and the chilling memory of his one encounter with The Governor—an admired but dictatorial man who tells Pong “Those who are born in darkness always return.”
A Wish in the Dark is a confident, well-made tale, written by an author skilled enough to take the plot over “many years passed” ellipses without slackening the momentum whatsoever. Set in a lightly fantastical world inspired by her Thai heritage, Soontorvat also manages to construct a convincing magical reality without spending undo time hashing out little details. The important thing here is the heart, as Pong is taken in first by Father Cham, an elderly monk with the power to bestow wishes that always come true, and then Ampai, a revolutionary leader who organizes the poor and working class against the Governor. Pong finds purpose, connection, community, and belief in his own ability to create change.
Unfortunately, these resoundingly powerful messages get a little lost in the book’s dogged focus on light and dark imagery. This is the light and dark of illumination/fire and absence of illumination/fire, rather than the light and dark of skin tone, but a dichotomy is still constructed where light is complicatedly but generally good (associated at various points with power, goodness, access to resources, skill, and sense of purpose, though also with the law, wealth and classist oppression, and surveillance) and darkness is complicatedly but generally bad (associated with impoverishment, aloneness, moral failing, oppression, and vulnerability). I found the persistent focus on light and dark a false path in this novel, as well as an unfortunate symbolic re-entrenchment of a damaging and overused “dichotomy,” because this book is actually far more about community versus isolation and empowerment versus disempowerment. Though they are undeniably present in a story that is about a dictator who restricts access to light, heat, and energy, light and darkness have little to nothing to do with the deep themes of this novel, and the focus on light and darkness as symbolic themes is unsatisfying and stereotypical.
This is an engrossing book about imprisonment, freedom, friendship, community, power structures, oppression, and the possibility of revolution, featuring a strongly-imagined fantasy world grounded in Thai culture. The characters are appealing and fully realized. Through reading against the grain, the truer and more important themes of A Wish in the Dark can be drawn out from a heavy-handed overuse of the damaging focus on the light/dark “dichotomy,” but I still look forward to future books where such a binary is not entertained as a useful narrative move.