The Wishing Year

Book excerpt: One New Year’s Day, Noelle Oxenhandler found herself alone after a long marriage, seemingly doomed to perpetual house rental, and estranged from her spiritual community. Though she was a skeptic at heart and a practicing Buddhist, she forced herself to try the art of wishing brazenly: for a new love, a healed soul, and the 2 BR/1.5 BA of her dreams. In this charming, compelling, and ultimately joyful book, Oxenhandler records a journey that is at once comic and poignant, light and dark, earthy and spiritual. Above all, she is amazed to find that there is, indeed, both power and danger in the act of wishing. For soon her wishes begin to come true–in ways that meet, subvert, and overflow her expectations. And what started as a year’s dare turns into a way of life.