Driving up Interstate 17 one December, Rich Geshel's daughter started singing about the star on the tree in the median. He wrote the song down. Then the two of them turned it into a book.
Out now in hardcover and paperback. Ages 4 to 8, about six minutes read aloud.
Where to find it
One is read out loud at bedtime in six minutes. The other takes a fourth grader three weeks and a flashlight.
A star sits above a desert highway collecting the wishes of everyone who drives past. It grows up. It gets its gift. Then it has to decide what a wish is actually worth.
$18.99
View the bookACRIONRichard Geshel
A boy makes a wish he never says out loud, and it drags his uncle through a portal into a game nobody explains the rules of.
$24.00
Read chapter oneThirty-two pages. The star starts small, waits a long time, and only gets one thing to give away.
Ornaments, tinsel, garland and a silver star appear on it before Thanksgiving. They come down after New Year's Day. Arizona's transportation department has said for years that nobody has worked out who is responsible. Whoever it is also ran drip irrigation out to the tree so it survives the summers.
Rich Geshel is an osteopathic physician. He studied zoology and history at Northern Arizona University, went to medical school at the Arizona College of Osteopathic Medicine at Midwestern University, and spent years practicing physical medicine and rehabilitation with Meritus Health in Hagerstown, Maryland.
He is now the first Chief of Osteopathic Principles and Practice at the Niazee College of Osteopathic Medicine. He writes in the margins of all of it. The Wishing Star came out of a car ride with his daughter Quinn, who shares the byline. Acrion came out of a game.
Free, no account, nothing to install. Teachers and librarians take the same kit home that parents do.
Download the free kitSix minutes cover to cover, with the page turns marked and the two lines kids always want to say themselves.
Colouring pages, a paper star to cut out and hang in a window, and a label for a wish jar.
Kindergarten through sixth grade. In person around Hagerstown, and by video anywhere else.
The tune Quinn made up in the back seat, recorded so you can sing it on your own drive.
Yes. Northbound on I-17 near milepost 254, in the median between Sunset Point and Cordes Junction. Do not stop on the highway to look at it. Slow down a little and let somebody else point.
Four to eight if somebody reads it to them, six and up on their own. Acrion is a different animal. Ten and up, and closer to three hundred pages.
Nobody will say. People have been putting ornaments on that juniper since the 1980s and the state has never worked out who. That is most of the reason the book exists.
A game. The kind that gets handed down until nobody remembers who made it. Rich took that and asked what would happen if the game could hear you wishing.
Rich's daughter, and the reason there is a book at all. She made up the song in the back seat. Her name is on the cover next to his.
Usually yes. In person around Hagerstown and by video anywhere else. Tell us the grade and roughly how many kids and we will work out the rest.
Once a season we send what the next book is doing, a new thing to print, and where Rich will be reading. That is the whole list.