Tilly Farmer is pretty content with her life. She is a high school guidance counselor at the school she graduated from in her home town of Westlake, Washington, she married to Tyler, her high school sweetheart and they are trying to have a baby, and she is surrounded by her family and friends.
What could get better than this?
When attending the local carnival, Tilly runs into her old friend Ashley Simmons, who is running the psychic booth. Instead of giving her a reading, Ashley claims she has given Tilly a much bigger gift, the gift of clarity, to see things as they really are. Confused, Tilly stumbles from the tent, but when things begin to go awry in her family, her friend’s lives, and in her own life, Tilly wonders if Ashley had really put some kind of spell on her.
In Allison Winn Scotch’s charming new book, “The One That I Want,” she examines the life of a small town girl and how an odd gift opens her eyes and heart to the way things really are around her. Scotch does a great job relating the story of Tilly, her background of growing up and taking care of her family after her mother’s death and her father’s retreat into the bottle, and telling the story of how Tilly had always been a “fixer” for everyone around her.
Now when Tilly looks at a picture of her sisters or her friends, she is able to mysteriously sees how their life will be in the immediate future, and it’s not always bad news. She sees her middle sister Lulu having a healthy pregnancy; she see her friend Suzanne meeting someone new after a devastating divorce; and she sees her baby sister Darcy coming back to help her with the high school musical production of “Grease” – a miracle in itself.
But she also sees her father falling off the wagon and driving home drunk, and she sees her own life collapsing around her when she glimpses into Ty’s photo, the unhappiness that is conveyed to her as she watches him leaving her so overwhelmingly painful for Tilly.
But through the confusion and the upheaval, the gift of clarity enables Tilly to find the strength, joy and love that will pull her through to find new kind of happiness for herself.
Allison Winn Scotch has crafted a book that adults will love, and is also appropriate for mature young adults. She imparts important life lessons through the book, but none more impacting than the following:
“The years are long and the roads are winding, and dreams float out there to be captured, but only if you are brave enough to reach up and grasp them.”
My Thanks to My Thanks to Crystal Patriache at BookSparks PR for the review copy of this great book. I was not compensated for my opinion.
