Hey, Good Luck Out There
a novel
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3.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Subversive, captivating and vividly attuned to both the extraordinary and the mundane, Georgia Toews’ debut novel Hey, Good Luck Out There is a furious and hilarious journey through the relentless, soul-baring world of addiction and recovery.
After an amazingly unpleasant pizza party intervention, our twenty-two-year-old narrator checks into a women’s rehab facility, confined "for her own safety" without meaningful contact with the outside world. For escape, she and her fellow patients have only stilted phone calls with their disappointed and concerned parents, daily meetings in the form of inspirational speeches from wealthy ex-alcoholics and lifestyle gurus, visits to the doctor, and clandestine trips to a dingy internet cafe. For our narrator, a neon-pink journal gifted by her grandmother with gold embossed letters on the front—“Let Them Eat Cake!”—is her only comfort amid an endless carousel of strangeness and unease.
When she is discharged from rehab after thirty punishing days, returned to Toronto’s streets without resources, a job, or an apartment, and tasked with staying clean despite a seemingly bottomless urge to give up, the book asks: What next? What happens in the aftermath of your lowest low? Alone, and at war with an intrusive inner creature, at last she begins the process of making a home for herself in the world.
Hey, Good Luck Out There introduces a dynamic new voice in fiction: Georgia Toews is at once unguardedly truthful, gritty, and darkly funny, with a sardonic, wholly original sense of the absurd.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In Georgia Toews’ stirring debut novel, we follow one woman on her journey before and after rehab. Our unnamed protagonist is a twentysomething woman who reluctantly checks into a treatment facility to appease her parents, but when she’s cast back onto the Toronto streets, she’s pretty much in the same place she was before. Using intimate first-person narration, Toews—daughter of best-selling Winnipeg novelist Miriam Toews—lets us see through her character’s detachment and discover the heartbreaking path that led her toward self-medication. Her fearlessly matter-of-fact approach to addiction makes makes sobriety seem less like a state of being and more like a constant series of decisions. As a result, Hey, Good Luck Out There becomes more than just one woman’s story—it’s a powerful look at the human condition.
