Lucky Breaks

[Insert usual why-can't-a-book-be-a-standalone-book-anymore rant here. Also: there will be a third, or at least that's the implication in Patron's acknowledgments at the end. ]

As her eleventh birthday draws near, Lucky finds herself wanting just one thing: a girlfriend. Lincoln's been her best friend for years, but lately Lucky's looking at him more critically: he's always so calm and rational, and so caught up in his knot-tying, and the secret project he's working on for the knotting competition he's entered. What Lucky wants in a friend is someone who knows how to have fun and do things that are maybe a little more dangerous, less predictable. So when Lucky meets Paloma, a girl her own age tagging along on a trip through Hard Pan with show more her geologist uncle, she knows Paloma is the adventure-friendly best friend she's wanted. As her friendship with Paloma grows, Lucky pushes Lincoln away--even when he's rescued her from an impossible jam of her own making.

Like its predecessor, Lucky Breaks has a quiet grace, a bittersweet story of learning just what loving someone means, whether it's a maternal figure (Brigitte in Higher Power) or a friend, as is the case here. Lucky is struggling to distance herself from Lincoln, and while adults will recognize exactly what she's doing and why, Lucky herself doesn't seem to know.

Unfortunately, while adults will recognize what Lucky is going through and appreciate the humor and bittersweet sadness of her early adolescence, it will be the rare kid who takes to this book. Lucky is so much younger than the older teens her character will speak to that they are unlikely to pick up her story; middle-school students who will relate to Lucky's chronological age will lack the maturity to understand her situation. It's a beautifully written story, but it's unclear who the audience for it will be. show less

Lucky makes a new friend while sabotaging her closest friendship. There's a little adventure with a treasure hunt, but mostly it's just slice-of-life, middle-school drama so bland I wonder why the author even bothered.

My wife is still going to read the final book in the trilogy to me, but I hope there's actually a point to that one.

On the eve of her eleventh birthday, Lucky wants to let loose and become intrepid; she's ready for life to change. But Hard Pan (population 43) drones on like it always Lincoln all tied up in knotty matters, Miles newly diagnosed as a genius but as needy as ever, Brigitte running her Café and trying to figure out what it means to be American.
Enter Paloma, tagging along on a visit to Hard Pan with a pack of hungry geologists. She's smart and pretty and fun -- definitely best-friend material. But will Lucky be able to cope with tomato worms, Short Sammy's mysterious box, the potential for disaster when Paloma's parents visit Hard Pan, and Lincoln's fame among knot tyers of the world?
Lucky's intrepidness is put to the test in this show more satisfying sequel to the Newbery Award-winning The Higher Power of Lucky. show less

(I now maintain a blog just for my kid-lit reviews. Find it at http://kidlit4adults.blogspot.com .)

A friend has convinced me to try my hand this year for the first time at writing children's literature; but I don't actually know anything about children's literature, so am starting the process among other ways by first reading a stack of existing books that have been recommended to me. This is the 2009 sequel to Susan Patron's The Higher Power of Lucky, winner of the 2006 Newbery Award (and which I've already reviewed in the past), around 40,000 words total and best suited in my opinion for ages ten to thirteen; and it's unfortunately also a good example of why sequels to character-oriented middle-school fiction are so rarely written, show more and why the key to a good chapter-book series always lies in the events that take place, not the people they happen to. Because the fact is that most of the charm of the original Higher Power resided in the natural pathos that came with our hardscrabble ten-year-old hero, Lucky -- in the first book she is dealing with the recent death of her mom, a deadbeat dad who wants nothing to do with her, the post-industrial California ghost town full of Unabomber types where she lives, the stresses of a flighty young French woman who has been thrust into the role of her guardian as an emergency stopgap measure, and a lot more, the uniqueness of all which is what mainly drives the slow and subtle plot on display. But in good kid-lit fashion, of course, all these issues are resolved by the end of that book; so there's not much pathos left by the start of the sequel, leaving its similar subtle plot this time very much lacking in the eyes of the typical reader.

Also, many of the issues from the original that were only borderline problems here tip over firmly into the legitimately problematic; for example, Patron has a bad habit of putting overly precocious, overly magical dialogue in the mouths of her kid characters, which she would always manage to rein in at the last second in the original but here she lets flow forth way too much at several points. (And make no mistake, by replacing the male best friend in the original with a new female best friend here, Patron definitively makes this a book that will appeal to girl readers exclusively.) By the end, then, the whole thing reads less like an actual kid-lit book and more like the kind of precious thing that many parents wish that kid-lit was like, which explains why this has been far less popular than the original Higher Power. A shame to see, because I really am quite a fan of the first book, but also a good lesson learned, that kid-lit multiple-book series are mostly driven by action and not character. show less

I liked Lucky Breaks almost as much as its predecessor, The Higher Power of Lucky. It is another gentle, delightful story of Lucky Trimble and the assortment of eccentric "desert rats" that make up the population of her town of Hard Pan, Calif., population 43. The conflict in this second novel is focused on Lucky's own insecurities. When her "meanness glad" acts up a few times with her two closest friends she has a few hard lessons to learn.

The developing friendship between Lucky and Paloma is quite well done. I forgot how much I had enjoyed the cast of the characters from Hard Pan. Very real emotions play out here.

This novel is less touching than The Higher Power of Lucky and takes a little time to find its uniqueness. About the first half of the story seems fairly repetitive to the first novel. However, the story improves about midway when Paloma comes to sleep over and the girls face a real danger in the desert. The climax and resolution are satisfying and give the novel its own identity in the end. In addition, there is a mystery surrounding Short Sammy that has a sweet and humorous explanation.

The chapters are short enough that a classroom teacher could read one a day to his/her class out loud. Depending on the content of the chapter, the teacher could give students various prompts to respond to in a writing journal regarding the themes or show more concerns or decisions the characters make at different stages. At one point, for example, Lucky deliberately sabotages Lincoln's project, which she doesn't realize at the time, he is making as a gift for her. The journal writings could become class discussion topics. show less