The themes that I really wanted to make sure I got right in A Wish in the Dark were the same ones that when I read Les Misérables myself, that I felt changed me. It was one of those books that I felt really changed the way that I look at the world, and it’s just such a gift to have a book like that, right? So one of the things that struck me when I read it first was that people are not what they seem on the outside. So you can look at someone and think that, okay, this person has made mistakes. They’re at this point in their life, you know, look at them from the outside and you’re making a lot of judgements about them. That’s what we do. And you never know their whole story, and if you did, you’d probably change your mind. So that was one theme that I wanted to get into, A Wish in the Dark.
And then the other one was that how much of an impact one person can have on the decades of time and an entire world, which happens in “Les Misérables”. The first part of that book is devoted … you’re kind of reading it and being like, when is the story going to start? Because it’s hundreds of pages that are devoted to this one priest who ends up doing something kind of small to help the main character. Just one little kind, small kind thing that ends up just reverberating through the whole book. And so I remember when I read that as a teenager, thinking like, okay, this is a Christian priest, but he could also be a Buddhist monk. There’s just so much about him that he could be anyone. He was just such a wonderful, good, and kind person. So that theme also went into A Wish in the Dark. So there’s a monk, a Buddhist monk in the story who does some small things that end up having this huge impact on the story.
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