The Night of Wishes

Gr 4–7—Shadow Sorcery Minister Beelzebub Preposteror receives a visit from the underworld informing him that he has not achieved his yearly quota of pestilence, pollution, and misery. Turns out his greedy aunt Tyrannia Vampirella suffers the same deficit. Tyrannia proposes concocting the Satanarchaeolidealcohellish potion which, if drunk entirely before midnight on New Year's Eve, allows all spoken wishes to be granted in reverse. These backward wishes will serve the further purpose of fooling Mauricio the cat and Jacob the raven, spies from the animal High Council into thinking Preposteror and Tyrannia wish everyone good, not evil. Mauricio and Jacob catch on to the deception and venture out of Villa Nightmare to save the world with no real strategy. Ende (1929–1995), author of The Neverending Story, first published this book in 1989, and Schwarzbauer and Takvorian present this superb German translation. It's C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters meets a Roald Dahl animal story. Pompous Mauricio and bumbling Jacob's tentative bravery fades in comparison to the squishy, gleeful nastiness of the potion makers with their dark magical expertise. Wordplay and nonsense rhymes add to their macabre plotting. Ende's fantasy seems less safe than current counterpoints. Only the potion makers' gratuitous—and mildly hilarious—backstabbing allows good a victory. Clocks drawn in the text mark the swift passage of time and add dramatic tension. Kehn's black-and-white illustrations, full of movement and magic, sometimes seem muddy without proper contrast.