Rule #1: Never trust your wish guide.
Rule #2: Do not swing his magical wrench.
Rule #3: If your piano hops after you, RUN!
Ten-year-old Max Chu is desperate, but no one is listening. Max knows his music instructor is evil. He wants to humiliate Max at tomorrow night’s concert. Max would do ANYTHING to avoid the big stage. But when his last-minute wish attracts magical help, he might be forced to rethink that…
Mylo Zapp is not a wish guide. His magic is faulty, his business plan stinks, and he’s definitely not supposed to leave his home planet, Omnus, to take on risky new clients. But who can stop a born entrepreneur?
Fast-talking Mylo persuades Max he can fix up his life. Instead of facing his fears, Max can “twist” them away using magical tools. So why worry? Unfortunately, Mylo’s twists come at a terrible price. Now planet Earth is breaking apart. Reality is twisting out of control, and the music teacher Max begged to avoid becomes a real-life supervillain — an eight-foot-long, man-eating piano bent on world domination!
Max has never felt so afraid in his life. But when an evil orchestra kidnaps his sister, Max must finally confront his arch-nemesis, live on stage, in the biggest concert in Earth history. Can Max pull it together for one last performance — or will he become the hungry piano’s next meal?
When 10-year-old Max Chu, presumed Chinese American, wishes upon what he thinks is a shooting star, Mylo Zapp, a mysterious blue-haired “life mechanic” with a magical wrench, appears from a “Wish World” called Omnus. Mylo is a young, sardonic Wish Guide, and soon, he is using his wish-granting powers to fix everything Max doesn’t like about his life: particularly escaping a dreaded concert performance and avoiding his terrifying, instrument-smashing music instructor, Al Chompkins, implied white. After Max’s wish for a canceled recital results in general mayhem and Max’s three-year-old “Child Genius” sister Baby Jess being kidnapped by an evil orchestra, Mylo casually informs Max that granting wishes is tearing everything apart—from planet Earth to the fabric of reality itself. Charles’s creative, high-energy plot fruitfully interweaves a life-size piano turned sentient supervillain, accelerated aging, and a World Repair Service that causes more chaos and calamity than anyone could have anticipated. Good fun for reluctant readers and young fans of speculative fiction, Max’s oft-comedic, onomatopoeia-packed journey will speak to those who feel overlooked or misunderstood, all while gently imparting the lesson that shortcuts aren’t always the best route. Ages 6–12. (Self-published)
