Three Little Wishes (Paul Cornell)

Three Little Wishes
Paul Cornell, illustrations by Steven Yeowell
Legendary Comics
Fiction, Fantasy/Graphic Novel/Humor
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: The qualities that make Kelly a great lawyer are the same ones that make her personal life miserable. Nobody reads the fine print more closely, or writes a more airtight contract... or lives by such strict rules that she can't even get five minutes into a blind date before overthinking things to death. Worried that Kelly is building walls of rules so thick she'll suffocate in them and die alone and miserable, her best friend Annie pushes her to do one impulsive thing - just one, no matter how small (and no matter how drunk she has to be to do it).
Which is how, thanks to the power of alcohol and an online auction, Kelly came into possession of an abandoned self-storage unit full of random junk - including one old bottle containing a trapped fairy lord, none other than the legendary King Oberon himself.
Oberon makes the incredulous woman an offer any mortal should jump at: three wishes, to do whatever selfish, impulsive, ill-thought-out things they please (and which the fairy will have no end of fun twisting around for his own amusement, because nobody can find a hole to exploit in a wish like he can). But Kelly is nothing at all like the other humans he's encountered in his long life. Not only does she refuse to use her wishes for personal gain, but she treats them as she would any contract negotiation - to the point where her first wish, for world peace, actually brings an end to global war and violent crimes. But even the best-worded and best-intentioned wishes can go terribly awry... and even the most selfless and rigidly rule-bound person (or the oldest and most devious of fairy kings) might find themselves in the sort of trouble they never anticipated.

REVIEW: An impulse read to kill time (when I wasn't concentrating enough to read a paperback), Three Little Wishes has a fun premise, but seems a bit confused as to what to do with it, or the characters it introduces.
Kelly is the ultimate contract lawyer who uses rules to shield herself from life's scary ambiguities and pitfalls. A (not-so-) recent breakup with Michael, one of the few men to last more than one date with her, only made her that much more rigid... especially since she knows it was her overthinking and overanalyzing and refusal to bend one iota to accommodate another human being (or allow a sliver of spontaneity into their lives) that killed the relationship. When Annie, among the few implied friends she has, pushes Kelly to break loose and do something spontaneous, Kelly bumbles and fumbles and fails until sufficiently lubricated with liquor (and the ease of online auction sites). It reduces her a bit from a full character to the sort of shallow caricature I've seen in too many half-baked rom-coms that reduce women to flailing, helpless objects trapped by their own foolishness (until a guy helpfully saves them from themselves, of course). Oberon, too, is supposed to have a more nuanced backstory that eventually comes out, but I also found him a bit hard to connect with.
I get that it was a comedy, of course, but humor is inherently subjective, and the brand on display here just felt too clunky and forced, especially given how it tries to both cling to the low-hanging fruit tropes and also explore and elevate its core concept of a mortal woman figuring out how to actually get a wish out of a trickster fairy without having it twisted back on her in an ironic or literal way. Oberon's abilities (or lack thereof) feel random and plot-convenient, as does his uneven character growth from a being who resents foolish mortals and enjoys defrauding them with deliberately-warped wishes to one who actually comes to understand and even care about people. Annie too often feels like a third wheel, the Black best friend who exists simply to support and enable the white lead in her pursuit of a more fulfilled life, and later in the story Michael is reintroduced in a way that challenges Kelly's determination to not use any of Oberon's magic on her own wants. As she struggles with renewed feelings for her ex, she finds herself facing unexpected fallout from her first wish, which may have ended a lot of human suffering but also led to a lot of people (and nations) losing a lot of money and jobs - such as an assassin who tries to resort to indirect methods to taking out the woman who ended his career. (How everyone found out it was Kelly also had the feeling of a plot weakness, because of course women can't help gossiping online, tee-hee.)
Things eventually resolve and the expected lessons are learned by the expected characters, but I couldn't help feeling an itch of dissatisfaction with how it all played out. It's an okay enough story, but I kept feeling like it could've been more than just "okay" if it had moved beyond the expected, tired rom-com cliches it seemed determined to cling to, even when the story tried to rise beyond them.

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