Lucky Turtle
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In this “thrilling” love story (Lily King, author of Writers & Lovers and Five Tuesdays in Winter), a teenage girl with a checkered past finds instant chemistry with a mysterious stranger.
Get author Bill Roorbach's brand new novel, Beep, too!
When sixteen-year-old Cindra Zoeller is sent to a reform camp in Montana after being involved in an armed robbery, she is thrust into a world of mountains and cowboys and prayers and miscreants and people from all walks of life like she’s never seen in suburban Massachusetts. At Camp Challenge, she becomes transfixed by Lucky, a camp employee of mysterious origin—an origin of constant speculation—and the chemistry between them is instant, and profound. The pair escape together into the wilderness to create an idyllic life far from the reach of the law, living off their resounding love, Lucky’s vast knowledge of the wilderness, and a little help from some friends.
But they can run from the outside world for only so long, and the consequences of their naïve fantasy of a future together—and circumstances shaped by skin color—will keep them apart for decades. Cindra gets trapped in a relationship, safely if stultifyingly suburban, where she is both cosseted and controlled by a man who claims to be her rescuer. But for Cindra, there will never be another Lucky, and she dreams of one day finding him, the only man she’s ever fully trusted, her soulmate.
Page-turning, full of vivid characters, delicious suspense, and ultimately joy, Lucky Turtle is a big- hearted, deeply engrossing love story from one of our most entertaining and perceptive writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Roorbach's sprawling latest (after the collection The Girl of the Lake) focuses on a white girl's coming-of-age and the men in her life. At 16, in the late 1990s, Cindra Zoeller is charged as an accomplice for armed robbery with her boyfriend, Dag, the older brother of a schoolmate. Dag, who is Puerto Rican, gets 20 years, while Cindra is sent to a Montana camp for juvenile delinquents. There she meets 20-something Lucky, who works as the camp's driver, whom she initially takes to be Crow before learning he's half Chinese and half white, and was raised by an adoptive Crow woman on the reservation. After learning the camp doctor regularly molests the girls, Cindra enacts a plan to stop him. Later, she escapes with Lucky's help. Roorbach disturbingly writes Lucky as a noble savage type: though illiterate, he has supreme wilderness survival skills, and he's a virgin. Of course, the pair's idyllic time hunting, fishing, telling stories, and having sex won't last, and Cindra faces great hardships in later years. Though the author has a knack for describing the natural beauty of the landscape, the mess of episodic scenes and backstories drags this down. This has its moments, but there isn't much in the way of staying power.
