Review: Careful What You Wish For by Zoey Lane

Jake was your typical nerdy dude. Sure he had some luck with the ladies, but he only had eyes for Abby. He thought it was fate when he got assigned to a group project with her for his college history lecture. What he wasn't counting on was getting stuck with Craig.

Craig was everything he wasn't. Cocky. Confident. Sexy. Irresistible to women. Irresistible to Abby.

It had Jake thinking about what it would be like to live life like that. To be the hottest thing in the room. It was the only thing on his mind when he visited a museum exhibit on Ancient Arabia with Abby and Craig for their group project, and it was the first thing that occurred to him when he met a creature claiming to be an ancient genie willing to grant a wish.

Only Jake is about to learn that you should be careful what you wish for. Because he wished to be the hottest person ever, but he never specified a gender. And it turns out the "genie" he encountered is really more of an ancient cosmic power looking to pass the time on earth by playing pranks on mortals who aren't careful with how they word their wishes...

Sure Jake is the hottest thing in the room. Only now he's Jessica. And he might just discover that he can finally live the life he's always wanted in this amazing new body!

It’s never fun to write a review of a disappointing book. Then again, it’s never fun to read a disappointing book.

The story isn’t terribly original, but a comfort food sort of story can be welcome. A young man on the nerdy side hinks he has an in with a hot girl in his class, only to find he’s being used by the hottie and her beefy hunk of a guy to get a good grade. When our hero discovers a cosmic power, he makes a wish to be hot himself, and finds himself in the body of the sexiest woman he can imagine. Obviously for a story like this one, things get sexy and all sorts of menage and harem fun ensues.

The problems I have with the story stem from the writing. Not all stories need to be baroque, but the level of repetition in this is hard to ignore. How many times do we have to see a reference to “having some fun” in one passage? Also, a ubiquity of pop culture references can be fine, but here they are neither clever nor inventive, and merely serve as barely-there jokes.

As someone who can often fall prey to a lack of editing myself, this is a story thatw ould have done well to go through a couple of rewrites before the publish button was pressed.

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