YMMV / Be Careful What You Wish For

• Adorkable: Samantha could be read as this at times. Her mind is a little out there, she has poor social skills and is a bit of a klutz.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Is Clarissa just a malevolent trickster trying to ruin a kid's life, merely phenomenally incompetent, or maybe subtly trying to teach Samantha a lesson about vengeance through giving her exactly what she wants? Given how Sam's wishes all revolve around one-upping Judith in some way, perhaps Clarissa's goal is to show Samantha that revenge won't satisfy her or make her life any better. Or is it possible that Clarissa is a Literal Genie who has to follow the Exact Words of the wishes she grants, regardless of her own feelings on the matter given how she tries to emphasize that Samantha must word her wishes carefully.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: Samantha gets turned into a bird at the end, and seems much happier as a bird than a human. It's still pretty sad when you consider how much her life must suck for this to be the case. On top of that, her family will never know what happened to her and will probably spend the rest of their lives wondering if she just ran away from home or something worse happened.
• Les Yay: The Foe Romance Subtext variety in the book's both-sides obsessive Samantha/Judith rivalry. For more modern (or retroactive adult) readers it can often come across as the closest thing to explicit queer subtext in the whole series, with popular Fanon around Judith being an Armored Closet Gay and Sam's story reading like classic Gayngst which can come across in her wishes (wanting to fill the societal role she's been pressured into but otherwise not suited for, her alienation from everybody, and mainly her desperate pining for positive attention from Judith). It's rather telling that Sam wishes for Judith to think she's the best instead of just being her friend...
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Some fans perceive Samantha as this, since she keeps making dumb wishes despite knowing how dangerous and unpredictable Clarissa's magic can be, and thus most of the stuff that happens to her after meeting Clarissa is self-inflicted (Judith stalking her, her turning into a bird).
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: For some, the overall misanthropy of the story was a little too much, especially with the complete lack of any sympathetic figures in Sam's life and her extreme Trauma Conga Line that leads to the total Esoteric Happy Ending mentioned above.
• Values Dissonance: Samantha jokes in an early scene to her friend about wanting to kill Judith, who's always bullying her, which is laughed off. That would probably be taken much more seriously these days.