The Wishing Carpet

A six-year-old asks if the Persian rug in her parlor is truly a Wishing Carpet. The question is deceptively simple, but in Glen Darrow's household, wishes carry deadly weight. Her mother Effie, an invalid trapped by illness and bitterness, has pinned her unfulfilled dreams onto this beautiful object. Glen's father carries his own ambitions for their striking daughter. And Glen, with the stubborn hope of childhood, believes that wanting something badly enough might actually change things. As she grows from a questioning girl into a young woman, Mitchell explores what happens when a child's identity becomes a battleground for her parents' competing hopes. The wishing carpet is both literal and metaphorical, a beautiful object onto which a struggling family projects its hunger for something more. Class, gender, the particular suffocation of caring for an ill parent, and the weight of inherited dreams all figure into this nuanced 1926 portrait of American ambition and its costs. For readers who appreciate early 20th-century literary fiction that examines domestic tensions with clear-eyed sympathy.