User:Hydrangeans/Wishing for Tomorrow

Wishing for Tomorrow is a 2009 novel written by British author Hilary McKay.

Background
[]

Plot
Miss Minchin's Select Seminary for Young Ladies is a boarding school for girls in Victorian London run by Maria Minchin and her younger sister Amelia Minchin. One of the students, Ermengarde St. John, is a close friend of Sara Crewe. Crewe used to be a student in the same school before her father died penniless, upon which Maria Minchin pressed her into working for the school alongside Becky, an orphan and scullery maid. Both Crewe and Becky sleep in attic rooms.

One day, when St. John goes up to Crewe's room in the hopes of surprising her with a gift, she discovers the room transformed from a dingy attic to resplendence filled with food, blankets, and various luxuries. Lavinia Herbert, another student with a history of bullying Crewe, makes the same discovery when she follows St. John upstairs. St. John obliges Herbert to keep the room's luxurious condition a secret; neither Crewe nor St. John mention it to each other.

Development
As a child, British author Hilary McKay significantly appreciated and frequently reread Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1905 A Little Princess. In her adulthood, McKay read A Little Princess with her daughter, who asked "what happened to Ermengarde and the other children that were left behind when Sara leaves?" McKay shared this lingering question about what happened to the remaining characters after the novel's conclusion, and she resolved to answer it by writing a continuation of A Little Princess, and this became Wishing for Tomorrow. In early drafts of Wishing for Tomorrow, McKay tried to imitate the stylized language of A Little Princess before eventually resolving to use "plain English". She reported "using the setting of Miss Minchin's" Select Seminary to "breathe atmosphere into the story, but I always planned to burn it down at the end of my story, it had to go". McKay wrote an epilogue set ten years later but ultimately did not include it in the novel.

Publication
Hodder published Wishing for Tomorrow in the United Kingdom in 2009, and Margaret K. McElderry—an imprint of Simon & Schuster—published it in the United States on January 5, 2010. Nick Maland created the illustrations. Upon release, the Hodder hardcover edition sold for £10.99 (GBP, ), and the McElderry edition sold for $16.99 (USD, ). The book is 288 pages long.

Reception
[]

The Christian Science Monitor reported that Wishing for Tomorrow "slyly deepens the original characters, while still making them recognizable".

Publishers Weekly wrote that the novel was "enhanced by Maland's period illustrations".

Reviewer Liz Murphy "predict[ed] that it will become a classic in its own right".

The Times criticized Wishing for Tomorrow 's depiction of Lavinia, averring that her "actions can't be explained away by a smattering of psychology and charity".

McKay reported that her daughter "said she enjoyed it very much, but … she's 12 now, and, quite honestly, is a bit more into vampires at the moment!"