By Paula L. Woods

As anyone knows who has read J.K. Rowlings’ Harry Potter novels or Stephanie Meyers’ Twilight series (or whose children have), young adult fiction is hotter than July. No longer restricted to the lives of white women and children during the Civil War or after, young adult fiction has grown up to address issues and themes that face real life teens in our complex age. Many of Walter Dean Myers’ novels, as well as those of Mildred D. Taylor (Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry) and Christopher Paul Curtis (The Watsons Go to Birmingham), have dealt with issues as diverse as the war in Iraq, sharecropping during the Depression and the civil rights struggle in Alabama. But these works are grounded firmly in the present or past. Few answer the speculative fiction question of “what if,” addressed most notably by black authors like Octavia Butler in the remarkable Kindred or more recently by Walter Mosley in his speculative novel 47.

Zetta Elliott, a Toronto-born and Brooklyn-based teacher, educator and writer, brings that historical grounding to A Wish After Midnight, a novel ostensibly written as speculative fiction for young adults grades 8 and higher, but which addresses family conflict, urban poverty, self-esteem and racism in a manner that will resonate with a much broader audience.

The novel’s narrator is Gemma Colon, a 15 year-old who lives in a Brooklyn tenement. The daughter of an African-American mother and Panamanian father, Genna has recently suffered the loss of her father who, disgusted by American racism and unable to provide for his family, has returned to Panama and her paternal grandmother, who has joined him there. Genna, the third of four children, wishes things were different, that “my hair was long and wavy like those caramel-colored girls in music videos,” or that her mother “didn’t always have that knot between her eyes from worrying about how she’s going to pay the rent, and buy food and clothes for us all.” Life in 2001 is hard for the Colons—older brother Rico has had a juvenile conviction yet persists in selling drugs for a woman in the building, older sister Toshi is obsessed with clothes and boys, Genna cares for infant brother Tyjuan while her mother holds down two low-paying jobs.

Elliott does an excellent job of immersing readers in the large and small details of Genna’s life—the squalid, two-room basement apartment; abuse from her classmates for her nappy hair, bookish ways and proper speech; taunting by her brother and his drug-dealing friends; her love for her little brother (“the other half of my heart”); and mixed blessings she finds in babysitting for a white Brooklyn family whose kindness unintentionally undermines Genna’s self esteem and gets her into trouble with her mother, who does not want Genna distracted from her studies by work: “She didn’t raise her daughters to play mammy to Miss Anne and her little white brats.”

Such deftly observed details engage the reader’s sympathy and makes us wish that Genna attains her goals—going to college and becoming a psychiatrist. “I know I’m going to do something with my life,” she insists. “I don’t need a big butt or light skin to be a psychiatrist. All I need is a chance.”

Genna regularly visits the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, a magical place of respite where she tosses pennies into a fountain. “Money unspent,” Genna calls it. “Wishes waiting to come true.” Her other source of comfort is first love Judah, a Jamaican teen and budding Rastafarian who recognizes Genna’s inner beauty and encourages her to explore her African heritage. She begins to lock her hair and think about a different life, “to look like somebody else for a day. To be yourself, but look different on the outside.”

After a particularly painful argument with her distressed mother, Genna finds herself at the Botanic Garden fountain and her favorite whispering bench, where her pain and longing spill out in tears while voices urge her to not look back and run. Excruciating pain and visions follow, followed by a fiery penny that she picks up and uses to make a fateful wish.

When Genna awakens, she’s in the same spot but badly injured, her back ablaze with pain from what appears to be a brutal flaying at the hands of whites. She also has been mysteriously transported to 1863 Brooklyn, which is a separate city and awash in racial tensions among whites, Irish Catholics and blacks, some of whom were born free while others escaped slavery and the Civil War raging in the South.

It is shortly after the Emancipation Proclamation, but Genna is by no means free—suspected of being a runaway slave, she is harbored in a black orphanage and later hired for menial wages to tend to the child of Dr. Brant, the kindly white physician who treated her. Dr. Brant and his wife are abolitionists, but that does not necessarily mean that they treat blacks as equals, especially Mrs. Brant, who refuses to call Genna by her name and sends her to a cramped segregated balcony after showing her off to friends at church.

Elliott does an excellent job of recreating 1863 Brooklyn and the tumult of the time, including the roiling anger against those who could buy their way out of military service that led to the deadly Draft Riots in July, the back-to-Africa movement that galvanized both white abolitionists and free blacks alike, and the overarching danger of being black and female that exceeds anything Genna had known in the 21st century. And although there is plenty of history embedded in the novel, A Wish After Midnight is written with a lyrical grace that many authors of what passes for adult literature would envy as it examines universal themes of finding lost love, belief in one’s dreams and the power of friendship.

It’s not often that I feel sorry to finish a book, but there’s a silver lining at the end of this remarkably engrossing and transcendent novel—there are enough loose ends that a sequel to A Wish After Midnight is surely in the works. Which gives me hope that there may yet be an African American blockbuster series to rival the Harry Potters or Bella Swans that dominate the young adult genre.

Paula L. Woods reviews films exclusively for The Defenders Online and books for various newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times.