The Lucky List
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Rachael Lippincott, coauthor of #1 New York Times bestseller Five Feet Apart, weaves a “breezy…truly charming” (Kirkus Reviews) love story about learning who you are, and who you love, when the person you’ve always shared yourself with is gone.
Emily and her mom were always lucky. But Emily’s mom’s luck ran out three years ago when she succumbed to cancer, and nothing has felt right for Emily since.
Now, the summer before her senior year, things are getting worse. Not only has Emily wrecked things with her boyfriend Matt, who her mom adored, but her dad is selling the house she grew up in and giving her mom’s belongings away. Soon, she’ll have no connections left to Mom but her lucky quarter. And with her best friend away for the summer and her other friends taking her ex’s side, the only person she has to talk to about it is Blake, the swoony new girl she barely knows.
But that’s when Emily finds the list—her mom’s senior year summer bucket list—buried in a box in the back of her closet. When Blake suggests that Emily take it on as a challenge, the pair set off on a journey to tick each box and help Emily face her fears before everything changes. As they go further down the list, Emily finally begins to feel close to her mom again, but her bond with Blake starts to deepen, too, into something she wasn’t expecting. Suddenly Emily must face another fear: accepting the secret part of herself she never got a chance to share with the person who knew her best.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After three years of dating Matt, part of a tight-knit white friend group in rural Huckabee, Pa., 17-year-old Emily Clark unintentionally blows up "her entire social life" at junior prom, three weeks before the book begins. Now, with her Black best friend, Kiera, away at camp, Emily is single and friendless, having only memories of her mother, who died three years ago, to keep her company as she and her father prepare to sell her childhood home. All looks grim until her dad's best friend, Johnny Carter, returns to town with his half-white, half-Japanese daughter, Blake, who's also 17 and whose mother died after childbirth. Caught up in a renewed friendship and discoveries about her mother's past—particularly her summer-before-senior-year bucket list—Emily sets out to complete the list with Blake by her side, leading to a summer of self-discovery. Solid pacing, paired with Emily's accessible first-person perspective, keeps the pages turning. In her solo debut, Lippincott (All This Time) presents nuanced characterization and pays particular respect to the grief process, offering an affecting core to this sweet contemporary summer romance. Ages 12–up.
