YA New York

I started crying on page 202, and I’ve only just managed to stop, a full fifteen minutes after having finished Lucky by Rachel Vail.

Okay, I have to admit that my first reaction upon picking up this book was, “Eww. It’s about eighth graders. It’s middle-grade fiction! This is going to suck.”

Clearly I need to get over my snobbery. Because how old was Sara Crewe in Frances Hodsgon Burnett’s classic A Little Princess? She was, I believe, a whopping seven years of age.

So age isn’t everything, and just because the heroine of a novel happens to be in eighth grade doesn’t mean she should be ignored. In fact, any gal who can make me cry for thirty pages should be taken very seriously indeed.

Back to the book: Phoebe Avery is accustomed to being lucky. At fourteen, she is one of the five most popular girls in the eighth grade, and president of her class. She lives in a large house outside New York City, with a swimming pool and a nanny and a housekeeper.

We meet Phoebe just as eighth grade is coming to a close, just as she and her girlfriends are planning their graduation party — the party of the year.

Only one little hitch: Phoebe’s family is suddenly … well, you know … poor.

YA authors break a lot of rules, one of which is that you never talk about money. Or if you do happen to write a book about a young girl finding herself in reduced circumstances, you make sure she gets a fairy tale ending. Essentially, a gal can’t be poor for very long, or it’s just plain depressing. Sara Crewe? I mean, you might not know this if you haven’t read A Little Princess, but she’s totally glam again by the end. And that’s what we love about it, right?

But Rachel Vail — quite a prolific writer, by the way, with a whopping thirteen other novels under her belt already — broke that rule, and she did it with style. No, Phoebe doesn’t get rich again, but Vail’s story is still wonderful and heartwarming, and even the not-quite-fairy-tale ending rocks. I won’t tell you how, but I think you’ll agree after you’ve finished Lucky.

“Talking about money is tacky,” Vail wrote in a note to reviewers. “Not talking about it can be shattering,” she said, adding that she herself experienced family financial woes as a fourteen-year-old. “The money/class taboo is what drove me to write my new trilogy.”

Ahem. Which means we’ve got two more awesome books headed our way. And I personally can’t wait to read them.

Buy Lucky from Amazon.com.

One last thing: Isn’t that little green dress on the cover to die for???

This entry was posted on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 1:07 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.