Lucky You
A Novel
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3.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An NPR Best Book of 2017
"A chillingly adroit debut novel." —Elle
“Lucky You is a marvel of a book, partly because Carter does a perfect job balancing humor and tragedy . . . As an author, she’s both unsparing and compassionate, and among her greatest gifts is an ability to find a savage kind of beauty in the unlikeliest of places.” —Michael Schaub, NPR
Ellie, Chloe, and Rachel are friends (sort of), waitresses at the same dive bar in the Arkansas college town they’ve stuck around in too long, each becoming unmoored in her own way. When Rachel falls under the sway of a messianic boyfriend with whom she’s agreed to live off–grid for a year, she convinces Ellie and Chloe to join them in “The Project.” With startling exactitude and wickedly deadpan humor, Lucky You, lays bare the emotional core of its characters with surgical precision.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Carter's ambitious debut novel delves into the ennui that comes with being young and unsure. Three 20-something women Ellie, Chloe, and Rachel, friends living in the same Arkansas town where they went to college circle in and out of each other's lives as they each grasp for identity and purpose. Ellie seeks romantic validation from a distant musician and her married boss while slipping slowly into drink. Chloe suffers from a variety of mysterious health problems she is not eager to cure or even to understand. Rachel lives with her sanctimonious boyfriend, whose wealthy parents pay for a house in the Ozarks where they all contribute to "The Project," an off-the-grid lifestyle based on vaguely new-age ideas of health and spirituality. For all their devotion to their assorted identities, be it girlfriend, mistress, or participant in "The Project," the women struggle to find a direction that sticks. This fruitless search is relatable to anyone who has ever been young and confused, and Carter's no-nonsense prose is darkly witty, lacking the self-indulgence or mean-spiritedness often seen in stories about modern youth. While the characters are each charming and believable, there is little narrative tension outside of their destructive spirals. Still, Carter's compassion for her lost young women is clear, and the story never falters from the starkly realistic trajectories marked out for the protagonists. The result is a clever and honest look at the consequences of youthful malaise.
