Wish You Dead by Rebecca Westcott

Title: Wish You Dead

Author: Rebecca Westcott

Genre: YA Mystery

Publisher: Scholastic Australia

Published: 1^st January 2026

Format: Paperback

Pages: 368

Price: $19.99

Synopsis: Mean Girls meets manifestation and murder … A contemporary teen thriller with a sapphic romance, perfect for fans of Heathers, Sue Wallman and Holly Jackson.

Sixteen-year-old Morgana Merrick is all about control. She’s the most feared, powerful and popular girl at Avalon Academy, while her half-brother, Art, and his chilled-out group of surfer friends reign peacefully in the year above, known for their legendary beach parties.

At one such party, an ugly encounter with one of Art’s friends leaves Morgana shaken. She retrieves the box under her bed filled with crystals, charm bags and her Book of Shadows, and asks the universe for justice to be served …

As frenemy after frenemy wrongs or irritates her, Morgana manifests revenge upon them- and, to her surprise, it works. She feels invincible. Until someone ends up dead.

Is the universe bending to Morgana’s will? Or is someone else behind the attacks? What is going on at Avalon Academy?

~*~

All Morgana Merrick wants to do is keep things under control. She’s the most popular and most feared student at Avalon Academy, watching her half-brother Art chill at beach parties with his surfer friends. And having things out of her control is not something Morgana likes. Everyone fears her, but when her friends start getting hurt, she’s convinced her hexes are to blame. After all, it happened to her stepmother when she was twelve. It’s been four years since her mother dropped her off with her father, Gordon, stepmother, Alice and half-brother, Art at Pendragon Hall and never returned. Since then, Morgana has felt invisible, as though she doesn’t fit in or doesn’t matter to anyone. Four years ago, she received her first Book of Shadows and witch’s kit, but she hasn’t touched it since Alice walked off and was never seen again.

But when Lance, Art’s best friend and Ginny’s boyfriend tries to force himself on her at a beach party, she decides to bring out her old witch’s kit and wreak revenge upon friends and frenemies. She wants justice to be served, but she’s not aware of what is really going to happen. People being humiliated online, or cast out of friendship groups. People spreading rumours about her, or people getting hurt. It seems that the spells are working, but is it really her power, or is someone else behind everything? Is there another person putting her wishes into action? Morgana is sure it’s her spells and hexes, and her new friend, Celeste, is trying to help her. As relationships are altered and fractured, people change and turn on Morgana, she’s more determined to make people pay. That is, until someone ends up dead. Surely her spells didn’t cause that, did they?

Everything burns and bubbles along as Morgana grapples with everyone casting her aside, with feeling like she can’t trust anyone, and feeling like her father doesn’t want her around. Tensions build slowly throughout the novel, with each event, and as Morgana’s past slowly comes out, revealing what she has gone through, what her family has gone through and how she fits into her world. Avalon is somewhere linked to magic and ley lines, to witch trees and places where magic and murder happen. There’s so much going on in this novel that has been bubbling along for years, and now, it’s all going to come to a head. But whether her brother and father finally learn to accept her in their lives and stop blaming her for Alice leaving is another question.

So what is really going on in Avalon and at Pendragon Hall, with these clever references to the King Arthur characters and places? It’s taken the things people know from Arthurian legends like the Pendragon family, Avalon, Arthur and Morgana having different mothers, and put it all into a modern setting. There’s even Guinevere and Lancelot equivalent.  Presumably, the Avalon in this story is set around where the Avalon of legend would have been thought to be. Yet in this modern world of high school and teenage parties, it also had elements of Mean Girls, but with magic.

It had witchy elements, which were cleverly done. Magic used for revenge and protection, magic used for chaos and the conflicts, and the tumultuous final years of school, where exams form a key part of the novel, driving parts of the school tensions. The girls, the Sisters, who were supposed to be Morgana’s friends could be quite nasty. It all works though, because whilst things seem to be clearcut on the surface, there is always the sense that something else has to be going on. Because everyone knows Morgana has always struggled, so it seems easy to blame her, or ascribe some things to accidents. She’s the scapegoat for much of the novel. And her feelings about feeling betrayed are justifiable. She deserves to feel everything she feels, and shouldn’t have had to keep everything to herself. Someone should have been there for her. And as the novel reaches its climax, things that people least expected come out. The subtlety of the delivery of the clues worked well, and is an interesting take on the mystery novel, where it is unclear what is really going on at any time. It’s an intriguing book that I think will find its readers, and its also a little but quirky, which I think makes books interesting.