What do you think?
Rate this book
Goodbye My Wishing Star
Twelve-year-old Jens is devastated when she finds out that severe financial problems may force her family to sell the farm which has been in the family for several generations.
128 pages, Hardcover
First published May 9, 1988
About the author
Vicki Grove
22 books18 followersVicki Grove lives in a 100-year-old farmhouse on a few acres of land outside of Ionia, Missouri (pop. 118). Her son and daughter, Michael and J.D., attend college, and her husband Mike is a music teacher and directs a bell choir. They have lots of cats and a goldfish pond teeming with bossy, headstrong goldfish. Sharing the pond with that rambunctious crew is one gentle red-eared turtle, Yertle. Behind the house grow three cherry trees, three apple trees, a corn patch, grape vines, and, on a good year, enough strawberries for Vicki to make a dozen jars of jam.
Vicki has written for magazines ranging from Twilight Zone to Reader’s Digest. She received the 1996 SCBWI Magazine Merit Award for a story in American Girl. Altogether, she’s published about 300 articles and short stories. “Because it’s not such a huge time and energy commitment, writing a short story is kind of like eating popcorn,” she says. “Writing a book, on the other hand, is a big deal, sort of like Thanksgiving dinner. You’d get tired of snacking or feasting if you did it all the time, so I alternate!”
Eight of Vicki’s eleven books are middle grade or young adult novels for Putnam. Her most recent are Rimwalkers, Crystal Garden, Reaching Dustin, The Starplace, and Destiny. Reaching Dustin and The Starplace were School Library Journal Best Books of 1998 and 1999.
Vicki writes every day in a tiny white office her dad built in her hayfield. He modeled it on her childhood playhouse, and it has its own birdhouse (where a tree frog named Joop is living). A purple clematis vine snakes up the side of the office, and beneath it grows a white peony bush Vicki transplanted from her grandmother’s farmhouse in Illinois, the setting for Rimwalkers.
Vicki has written for magazines ranging from Twilight Zone to Reader’s Digest. She received the 1996 SCBWI Magazine Merit Award for a story in American Girl. Altogether, she’s published about 300 articles and short stories. “Because it’s not such a huge time and energy commitment, writing a short story is kind of like eating popcorn,” she says. “Writing a book, on the other hand, is a big deal, sort of like Thanksgiving dinner. You’d get tired of snacking or feasting if you did it all the time, so I alternate!”
Eight of Vicki’s eleven books are middle grade or young adult novels for Putnam. Her most recent are Rimwalkers, Crystal Garden, Reaching Dustin, The Starplace, and Destiny. Reaching Dustin and The Starplace were School Library Journal Best Books of 1998 and 1999.
Vicki writes every day in a tiny white office her dad built in her hayfield. He modeled it on her childhood playhouse, and it has its own birdhouse (where a tree frog named Joop is living). A purple clematis vine snakes up the side of the office, and beneath it grows a white peony bush Vicki transplanted from her grandmother’s farmhouse in Illinois, the setting for Rimwalkers.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
July 26, 2022
I've never lived anywhere but my hometown and after reading this I'm kind of glad
July 28, 2021
This is another period piece about the poverty that hit the Midwest in the 80s, driving people out of their family farms. This is before the white privilege myth, when publishers still allowed books showing reality, rather than the 1%. In this novel, Jens is an ordinary girl living on the farm that has been in her family for generations. She watches the hardship all around her, as families lose their farms, a classmate's dad dies of a heart attack from financial ruin, and other kids live in such abject poverty that they must beg and have no decent clothes. Her family also loses their farm and this book is her diary telling the story of how it happened, which she plans to leave in the barn for the new owners to discover. A sad story that rang true for so many people in the midwest.
July 30, 2022
Interesting read from a pre-teen’s POV about the farming recession that hit the Midwest in the 80s. Nostalgic, and educational.
To address another reader lamenting the fact that the myth of White Privilege exists and that this book hearkens from a time when books that showed reality instead of “the 1%” were published, I can only refer them to the piece from TIME magazine: “Dear Privileged-at-Princeton: You. Are. Privileged. And Meritocracy Is a Myth.”
To address another reader lamenting the fact that the myth of White Privilege exists and that this book hearkens from a time when books that showed reality instead of “the 1%” were published, I can only refer them to the piece from TIME magazine: “Dear Privileged-at-Princeton: You. Are. Privileged. And Meritocracy Is a Myth.”
October 5, 2024
If these pages are covered with dirt and wasps' nests and stuff, I'm sorry. I'm writing this in the hayloft so Roger can't find me and get his sticky hands all over everything. I'll leave this here when I'm done, hidden under the hay, and if you find it and read it you'll know what the last weeks have been like for us.
I'm Jens. Jens Tucker. I'm twelve years old and this was my farm before it was yours. . . . I think I'm leaving this for you instead of taking it with me because I figure it may make you really appreciate what you've got here, if you know how much I'm somewhere missing it. I figure leaving will be an ache in me for a long, long time. Maybe forever.
-----------------------
This short book hit me squarely in the heart. Running beneath the average preteen school drama is an undercurrent of sorrow, not only because of what we know from the opening chapter, but because of the signs Jens sees that their farm is in imminent financial trouble, despite her parents saying nothing about it and her fiercely trying to repress any understanding of what those observations and sense of uneasiness might mean.
It's also full of lovely details about small rural towns, from the handful of businesses so small you can count them, to the red brick school building, to the local weekly auction where everyone honors the right of a foreclosed farmer to buy back his equipment at cost. I loved the way she describes her own farmstead and those of her neighbors, the dairy herd, and the titular "wishing star" you can see just before dawn through a knothole in the milk barn.
One of many older children's books where I find myself wondering what her children are like and what kind of parent she would grow up to be in the background of a YA novel today, what stories she would tell and how her past might inform her parenting style.
--------------
I'm writing this so you'll appreciate every minute and every second of what you've got.
I'm Jens. Jens Tucker. I'm twelve years old and this was my farm before it was yours. . . . I think I'm leaving this for you instead of taking it with me because I figure it may make you really appreciate what you've got here, if you know how much I'm somewhere missing it. I figure leaving will be an ache in me for a long, long time. Maybe forever.
-----------------------
This short book hit me squarely in the heart. Running beneath the average preteen school drama is an undercurrent of sorrow, not only because of what we know from the opening chapter, but because of the signs Jens sees that their farm is in imminent financial trouble, despite her parents saying nothing about it and her fiercely trying to repress any understanding of what those observations and sense of uneasiness might mean.
It's also full of lovely details about small rural towns, from the handful of businesses so small you can count them, to the red brick school building, to the local weekly auction where everyone honors the right of a foreclosed farmer to buy back his equipment at cost. I loved the way she describes her own farmstead and those of her neighbors, the dairy herd, and the titular "wishing star" you can see just before dawn through a knothole in the milk barn.
One of many older children's books where I find myself wondering what her children are like and what kind of parent she would grow up to be in the background of a YA novel today, what stories she would tell and how her past might inform her parenting style.
--------------
I'm writing this so you'll appreciate every minute and every second of what you've got.
June 29, 2013
I had this book as a youngster and have been collecting my childhood books from Amazon and re-reading them. I can't say I liked Jens, the main character, very much, but I found her very authentic. I had forgotten nearly all the book except Jens' family is losing their farm, and one scene where Jens gets smacked in the head with some berries. I don't have much to say about this short little weekly reader:
likes: Jens is annoyingly selfish but very much like many teenagers. No insta-love here, no romance, just trying to figure out how to be happy when life is changing and your teeth are crooked, and friendship can be complicated. I also liked her parents.
disliked: I wished some other characters' stories were explored, and I wish that Jens had been a little bit more likable so I could have empathized with her a little more.
likes: Jens is annoyingly selfish but very much like many teenagers. No insta-love here, no romance, just trying to figure out how to be happy when life is changing and your teeth are crooked, and friendship can be complicated. I also liked her parents.
disliked: I wished some other characters' stories were explored, and I wish that Jens had been a little bit more likable so I could have empathized with her a little more.
April 7, 2010
A sad story of a girl whose family has to leave the farm where they have lived for generations becasue they can no longer afford to stay. A good lesson about family and home and everything those two words mean.
February 14, 2008
this book is a sad book because i know what it feels like to live in a place half of your life and then your parents decide to move!
Read
October 7, 2016good book
Want to Read
April 28, 2017I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/14522587
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/14522587
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews