Summer of My Amazing Luck
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- € 9,99
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- € 9,99
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'Toews's debut is a tart, affectionate look at welfare mothers...Toews is especially good on the "rollicking, happy, impoverished family" of the projects [and] scathing about the humiliations of poverty.' New York Times
Lucy and her eight-month-old son live in a Winnipeg housing project filled with single mothers on the dole. Still dealing with her own mother's sudden death, and new to the ever-multiplying complications of life on welfare, Lucy strikes up a friendship with her neighbour, Lish. On the whole, they're pretty happy . . . But Lucy wants to make sure they stay happy. And she has a plan.
Told with Toews's signature scalding wit and deep compassion, Summer of my Amazing Luck is a brilliantly funny book about the intricacies of friendship, grief, and poverty.
'[A] picaresque account of two welfare moms having loopy adventures and getting by in the city... The novel's voice [is] amused, warm, curious, alive on the page.' The New Yorker
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Originally published in Canada in 1996, this light treat by the author of A Complicated Kindness and A Boy of Good Breeding sees 18-year-old single mother Lucy Van Alstyne join the nouveau poor on the dole in Winnipeg, Manitoba. At a public housing complex nicknamed Half-A-Life, mothering is the noblest calling and absent fathers are as relevant as orbiting "space junk." Lucy doesn't know which of "eight or nine" fleeting lovers fathered her infant son, Dillinger (named after John Dillinger, who Lucy insists is a lucky man and still alive); her fast friend Alicia fantasizes about reuniting with the fire-eating juggler who got her pregnant with twins during a one-night stand several years earlier. Lucy fabricates letters to Alicia from the fire-eater, and the two women and their five kids set off to search for him. The novel offers a humorous look at the absurdities of the Canadian welfare system while unwinding the intricacies of a sticky-sweet friendship.
