Name: Wishin' and Hopin'
Rating: 5.0 (2 reviews)
Author: Wally Lamb

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Book Summary

Wally Lamb delivers a holiday treat with Wishin' and Hopin'—an unforgettable novella that captures the warmth and joy of the holiday season. Poignant and hilarious, in a vein similar to Jean Shepherd’s A Christmas Story and David Sedaris's The Santaland Diaries, Lamb's Christmas tale focuses on a feisty parochial school fifth grader named Felix Funicello—a distant cousin of the iconic Annette!

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Christmas/Holiday books
I enjoy reading Wishin' and Hopin' by Wally Lamb every holiday season. It is a quick, light , funny read, especially if you are over age 50 with memories of school Christmas pageants! Makes a great...
-Laurie_L

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Media Reviews

"Full of pop-culture references of the day (1964), this will have broad appeal." - Library Journal

This information about Wishin' and Hopin' was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

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Cathryn Conroy

Laugh, Love and Be Joyful! This Book Is Perfect
If you read this book in a public place, such as a crowded commuter train or on an airplane, beware! Parts of it are so laugh-out-loud funny that I had to stop reading to wipe the tears from my eyes.

Written by genius Wally Lamb, this is the story of Felix Funicello, who is in 5th grade in the fall of 1964. (Yes, his third cousin in Annette Funicello!) Felix attends the local parochial school and after inadvertently making his teacher, Sister Dymphna, have a nervous breakdown, the class gets a long-term sub who is not a nun. And then the real fun begins. While the plot culminates in the school's Christmas show/pageant, the heart and soul of the book are in the day-to-day experiences of Felix and his friends, one of whom is a Russian girl who teaches the boys to swear in Russian (among other things!).

While it's an ideal book to read in December, it will be just as heartwarming and humorous any month of the year. If you need a distraction from your real life, read this. And enjoy the belly laughs.

Bonus: The epilogue is brilliant!

MCC115304

A Funny Trip Down Memory Lane
Any child of the sixties will remember the corny jokes and childish behaviors of this 5th grade boy in the Catholic School System. I laughed out loud at several of the unexpected turns of one semester in his classroom, his introduction to the new French teacher and a new Russian student. Very entertaining and light reading to spark an evening or two.

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Author Information

Biography
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Wally Lamb Author Biography

Wally Lamb is the author of the New York Times and national bestseller The Hour I First Believed, as well as the novels She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True, both #1 New York Times bestsellers and Oprah's Book Club selections. His first novel She's Come Undone received rave reviews when it was published in 1992. The book was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Awards' Art Seidenbaum Prize for First Fiction and was named as one of the most notable books of the year by numerous publications, including The New York Times Book Review and People magazine. We Are Water will be published in October 2013.

A graduate of the Vermont College MFA writing program, Lamb is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Connecticut's English ...