Lucky Breaks Book

In her first companion novel to the Newbery Medal-winning The Higher Power of Lucky, author Susan Patron has managed to do something rare and quite beautiful: evoke all of the charm stitched into the seams of the original while tackling issues old and new that force Lucky to stretch her heart and mind to their fullest capacity.

Susan Patron is an excellent, wonderfully sensitive writer, capturing with grace and nuanced skill the moods and conversations of the kids that populate Lucky Breaks. She never allows anyone to become cliche, or for the deep personal realizations that they grow into to become hackneyed in the least bit. It's all very real, and unfolds with the dignity and drama that makes up so many of the seemingly small moments that have such a big impact on the lives of all people.

Lucky is an enthusiastic, passionate girl, whose high hopes for her life now that she is on the cusp of age eleven shine brightly in the ways that she sees others, and how she views her own legacy in the world. She is a confused girl, though, whose friendships are redefining themselves right before her eyes. If she doesn't shift along with them, she knows that she will be left behind, but what is she to do when her best friend Lincoln appears destined to leave their tiny town to go live in England as a champion knot-tyer, when she comes across a new girl named Paloma who just might be the sort of girl who would make a perfect best friend, when the small boy next door turns out to be a genius, and her pal Short Sammy might be making plans to deal with his own demise?

Lucky's life never has lined up with the tracks on which most people so smoothly ride. As with The Higher Power of Lucky, in Lucky Breaks she is learning to deal with her own pain and anger, with her sense of abandonment caused by her mother's death years earlier and her father's repeated refusal to be a part of her life. Lucky has a strong, big heart that allows her to forge her own way in life, but it's a heart that also makes a big target for deep hurt.

Stretched between her two so different best friends in a world that has such goodness and pain swirled around in an impossible to divide mix, Lucky must try to make peace with the unchangeable fixtures of her own past and understand that a person doesn't get forever to do right by the people around them, that relationships can disappear unexpectedly and that to hold on to both of her best friends, she will have to learn to let go of some things and embrace the inevitability of change.

Susan Patron has definitely found the ideal story in which to use her humorous yet delicate writing touch. She understands Lucky with such wonderful tenderness, and that is what transforms the book into what it is, a splendid work of literature by an author who is consistent in producing tales that charm, while also provoking a lot of deep thought. This is a superb novel with a great deal of heart.