One-sentence review:
Wry, dry (even though it’s set in a rainy Canadian city) and moving.
Slightly longer review:
You know a book’s good when you sorely miss the characters after you finish reading – and that’s what happened to me with The Summer of My Amazing Luck.
I wanted to keep in contact with Lucy, the 18-year-old narrator and single mother who moved into a welfare block filled with other single mothers.
I wanted to drink tequila with Lish, Lucy’s best friend from the block, who never shaves her legs and has a mane of wild hair that matches her personality.
In short, this wry, direct and picaresque book about single mothers living through a rainy Canadian summer somehow stole my heart.
There’s no great plot, and the character development is subtle – but it drew me in with its sharp and believable writing that was effortless to read. More than anything, though, it’s the characters that made this book – from Sally the mute to Terrapin the hippie. It’s a tired cliché to say that characters leap off the page and yet, more than nay other book I can remember, in this case I truly felt like they did.
I loved reading this.
