52 pages • 1-hour read
The Wish
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Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “’Tis the Season: Manhattan, December 2019”
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness and death.
Forty-year-old Maggie Dawes lives in Manhattan, where she owns an art gallery with fellow artist Trinity. She is a famous travel photographer, having visited dozens of countries throughout her life. A few years before, she was diagnosed with stage 4 melanoma cancer that had metastasized into her vital organs.
Maggie posts a series of videos on YouTube that she calls her “Cancer Videos” that discuss her illness. They receive millions of views and, as a result, Maggie’s photography becomes significantly more popular. Because there is only one employee at the gallery, Luanne Summers, Maggie decides to hire another worker to handle the influx of visitors.
Maggie, Luanne, and Trinity interview several candidates. One man, 22-year-old Mark Price, stands out from the rest. Maggie is hesitant to hire him, mostly because of a gut feeling. She is afraid that he knows too much about her from her videos online and that he is more interested in her illness than the gallery. However, she decides that he is more than qualified for the job and, despite her hesitancy, hires him. Over the next few weeks, she comes to consider him a good friend.
Maggie learns that her cancer is no longer treatable. She and the doctor discuss ways to make her final months more comfortable. She struggles to tell anyone about it, instead keeping the information to herself.
A week later, on December 18, Maggie goes into the gallery. She looks at photos in her office of her last trip to Mongolia. Thinking about things like how this will be her last Christmas and how she’ll never travel again, she breaks down crying.
Mark hesitantly knocks on her door and offers her a smoothie. She gratefully takes it. She admits to him that her cancer is no longer treatable. She then starts asking him questions about his life to distract herself. She asks him about his fiancée, Abigail. He tells her that she is coming to visit at the end of the month. He is convinced that he wants to spend the rest of his life with her.
Eventually, the conversation turns to Maggie, who admits that she regrets never getting married. She tells Mark that there was a time, when she was 16, when she thought she had been in love. Mark asks her to tell him the story.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Marooned: Ocracoke, 1995”
At 15, Maggie is living in Seattle. One morning, she discovers that she is pregnant. She is sent by her parents to Ocracoke in North Carolina to live with Linda, her father’s older sister, shortly after she turns 16.
Maggie is disappointed by Ocracoke and her aunt’s house. Because it’s November, it’s largely deserted, with only a handful of residents living there year-round. It’s a small fishing village, which Maggie thinks is “ugly.” Similarly, her aunt’s house is small and rundown, and Maggie notes how there isn’t even a television. When she’s left alone that night, she lies in bed and holds her teddy bear that she got as a child—named “Maggie-bear”—as she breaks down crying.
Over the next few weeks, Maggie grows increasingly depressed over her pregnancy and her new home. Her aunt tries to help, taking her to the shop she owns in town and introducing her to her co-owner, Gwen, but it does little to cheer Maggie up. She fails most of her schoolwork, spends most of the time in her bedroom, and even avoids Gwen and her aunt during Thanksgiving.
Because Maggie’s family is devout Catholic and Linda used to be a nun, Linda insists they go to church every Sunday. It takes the entire day, as they are forced to take a ferry to reach it.
On the Sunday after Thanksgiving, Maggie avoids Aunt Linda and Gwen on the journey to church. She spends most of the time in the car, then goes to the front of the boat to look at the ocean. On her way back, she notices a dog that is throwing out trash in the garbage can. It reminds her of her own dog, Sandy, and she feels extremely homesick.
When the dog goes back to the edge of the boat, she notices a teenager sitting in the chair. She asks him about his dog. Her name is Daisy, and the boy is training her to become a support dog as part of an Eagle Scout project. He introduces himself as Bryce Trickett.
Bryce tells Maggie about himself. He’s 17 and starting school at West Point in the fall. Maggie’s aunt has already told him about Maggie and asked Bryce to be her tutor. Bryce tells her that he is considering the idea but wants to get to know her first.
Maggie feels a mix of intrigue and annoyance toward Bryce. She notes how attractive he is and also how her pregnancy and her hormones affect her interest in boys, but she’s grateful to meet someone else her age on Ocracoke. When Aunt Linda tells her it’s time to leave, she feels “a strange mixture of relief and disappointment” at leaving Bryce (79).
On the ride home, Maggie’s glad when her aunt and Gwen do not ask her questions about Bryce. When she gets home, Maggie eats all her dinner for the first time in a while. She then goes to her room and starts working on her homework.
Aunt Linda comes to Maggie’s room and tells her that she’s glad she is eating and doing schoolwork. She did not tell Bryce about her pregnancy, but she suggests that Maggie tells him before he finds out on his own. Maggie is hesitant but decides Linda is probably right. She agrees to let Bryce be her tutor. When Linda leaves the room, she tells Maggie that she loves her. Maggie responds with the same, then realizes it’s the first time they’ve said it to each other.
Chapter 3 Summary: “The Nutcracker: Manhattan, December 2019”
Maggie pauses her story, feeling too tired to continue. Mark insists that she finish the story another time, and Maggie is surprised that he is interested. He asks if she kept in touch with Linda. Maggie tells him that they wrote back and forth for years until Linda died six years before. Maggie felt closer to Linda than anyone else in her family. She admits to herself that she never felt like she belonged in Seattle again after her time in Ocracoke.
Mark reminds Maggie that Luanne—who is on vacation—left Maggie a card. She opens it, finding two tickets to The Nutcracker ballet. Maggie insists that Mark join her for it.
Over the next two days, Maggie spends most of her time sleeping. She does not have the energy to do much else. She also wants to be sure she can make it through The Nutcracker.
On Friday night, Maggie and Mark go to The Nutcracker. She sees how enthralled he is by the performance, noting how new it must be for someone who is not from New York. After, she invites him to dinner.
At dinner, Mark asks about Bryce. He insists that he wants to hear the rest of the story. Maggie begins telling her story as they wait for their dinner to arrive.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
Structurally, Sparks’s narrative alternates between two timelines—Maggie’s declining health in Manhattan in the present, and her teenage past in Ocracoke. For the Manhattan timeline, Sparks utilizes a limited third-person perspective, focusing on Maggie and revealing only her thoughts. When the novel flashes back to Ocracoke, he switches to Maggie’s first-person point of view, using the device of an embedded narrative as Maggie tells Mark the story of her relationship with Bryce. Sparks structures his narrative to allow the past timeline to inform Maggie’s crisis in the present. Both narrative perspectives give insight into Maggie’s thoughts and feelings, chronicling her arc across the whole of her life.
In each timeline, the narrative point of view centers Maggie’s internal conflict. In the present, she struggles with feelings of despair and loneliness as a result of her terminal diagnosis. Her career as a travel photographer has created a life of isolation for her, marked by frequent travel, a hectic schedule, a lack of romantic relationships, and a feeling of disconnection from her parents after her time in Ocracoke. Late in her life, Maggie finds herself struggling to talk about her new diagnosis, living her life in a constant state of: “[H]ere I am, waiting to die” (23). She notes that when she returned to Seattle after her pregnancy, she felt as though “her months in Ocracoke had turned her into someone she no longer recognized, and there were times when Seattle no longer felt like home. In retrospect, she understood that even back then, she’d been counting the days until she could finally leave for good” (93). This present-day perspective on her time in Ocracoke positions Maggie’s account as a coming-of-age story—one in which she experiences both love and loss and emerges ready to leave her childhood behind and begin her life as an adult.
The use of the first-person perspective in the past timeline emphasizes the isolation of Maggie’s early days in Ocracoke, which mirrors her loneliness at the end of her life. In the first few days in Ocracoke, she remains largely isolated in Aunt Linda’s home. She neglects her schoolwork, rarely eats, and suffers on her own with her pregnancy symptoms. Maggie’s attitude is reflected by her initial perception of Ocracoke, which she views as “ugly” because “[t]he houses [are] old and weather-beaten; there [isn’t] a beach, boardwalk, or palm tree in sight; and the village—that’s what [her] aunt call[s] it, a village—seem[s] utterly deserted” (39). The setting—and, more importantly, Maggie’s perception of it—reflect her internal feelings of displacement and distress at leaving her home. As a result, she finds her despair and isolation reflected in Ocracoke itself.
The changes Maggie experiences during her time in Ocracoke evidences The Transformative Power of Love. The relationships Maggie builds with Gwen and Linda, and the love she finds with Bryce, provide her with the support she needs to truly get to know herself and build a new vision of the future. Her romantic connection with Bryce catalyzes her growth, allowing her to adapt and be truly happy in Ocracoke. The first night after she meets him, she socializes with Gwen and Linda, eats dinner “for the first time in a while,” noticing the beauty of Ocracoke in “the moon hovering over the water, making the ocean glow almost silver” (81), and working on an essay she had been neglecting for weeks. These small changes convey the impact that Bryce immediately has on her life, as she begins to overcome the feelings of despair and abandonment that surround her pregnancy and departure from Seattle. In the present, her growing friendship with Mark—and his companionship during her final Christmas—becomes central to her ability to face and cope with her death. The embedded narrative device underscores the novel’s thematic interest in The Importance of Human Connection When Coping With Difficult Circumstances. As Maggie tells Mark her story she moves through her grief over Bryce’s death, the loss of her child, and her own imminent passing.
Maggie’s relationship with photography and video over the course of the novel highlights The Role of Art in Self-Discovery. The YouTube videos that Maggie makes to confront her illness provide her with artistic platform to talk candidly about her illness, discussing the impact that it has on her physically and mentally, her fears, and her ruminations about life with an openness that she struggles to achieve in person. She notes that “what she imagined would be a lonely voice echoing back at her from the empty reaches of the internet somehow managed to catch the attention of others” (3). In this way, her videos become a key coping mechanism, both for herself and others. On video, she’s able to openly discuss her journey, explore her feelings, and record her thoughts, allowing her to both understand herself and helps others better cope with their own diagnoses.
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