College student Lucie has always known that she has a different dad to her younger sister and she's been conscious all her life of looking different to both her family and to most of the people in her small Norfolk town. She makes friends with Nav, member of a large extended family who sometimes wishes he had less family, just at the point where she's about to get her DNA tests back and he helps her to navigate the science while she teaches him how she sees differently as an artist. Microaggressions for both of them cement their friendship, and it's touching to see it develop while we also see the points of view of both sets of parents (I'm reading another multiple-narrator novel at the moment), Nav's dad being very different in his own narratives than from what Nav sees. Art and science have equal value and we follow Lucie through a few subsequent years as she develops her artistic practice. Some of the themes are very linked to the author's own life and she mentions in her note at the end that "We need better stories around living as a mixed-race person".

Reviewed on my blog 9 October 2024: https://librofulltime.wordpress.com/2024/10/09/book-reviews-two-great-ya-reads-from-amanda-addison-and-jason-reynolds/

Lucie looks different to the rest of her family but when she decides to secretly send off a sample to a DNA testing website she has no idea just what she’ll unearth.

*Spoilers ahead*

As soon as I started reading this I realised this was a YA novel - but that was ok. The characters of especially Lucie and Nav were well written for their ages but I started to skim the adults’ chapters - Maneer’s especially was wholly unnecessary even though he was in the running to be dad for a while. I felt the reveal dragged on for a little too long, but the nuances were still unexpected. I actually enjoyed the Epilogue, which showed the aftermath of the reveal and how family can slowly come together as a situation like this is unlikely to be instantaneous.

A heartwarming YA story about Lucie searching for the truth about her ancestry.
Following a chance encounter, Lucie and Nav quickly become friends, and begin the hunt for information concerning Lucie’s dad. What the author did well was to highlight how difficult it is to wade through family secrets sensitively. I learned things I didn’t know before and I enjoyed the story from multiple perspectives, which added context and depth to characters.
However the story was just a little repetitive and I found Lucie slightly annoying and whiney. That being said this is a charming read.

I really enjoyed this book! It follows Lucie, a young adult looking for the truth of her heritage, who decides to do a DNA test and figure out her genetic identity. She makes a new friend, Nav, who helps her in her journey of discovery, and together they unlock some secrets which are huge and hard to come back from. I loved how the story developed and would love to read more by this author in the future.

Looking for Lucie is a gorgeous story about friendship, family and discovering who you really are.

When Lucie turns 18 she secretly takes a DNA test, wanting to learn more about her biological father. She is the only mixed race member of her family and struggles with constant questions about where she's really from and why she doesn't look like her parents.

She meets Nav in a chance encounter and quickly become friends. He helps her with her DNA test results and sets off a series of unexpected events leading to Lucie discovering a lot about her father.

I really enjoyed this book. It's fast paced, the characters are brilliant and I wanted to unpick the mystery alongside Lucie. I would definitely recommend this one.

I loved that this book really made me think about the way we as adults decide to control the information that children have access to, even if it's related to them. In this book, Lucie wants to work out who she is. She knows that her mum is white but has no idea about the identity of her father other than the fact that her mum told her she was donor conceived. She also knows that her skin tone is completely different to her mum's and her younger sister's. This book looks closely at how important it can be to know where you come from and what your racial identity is. I've seen from the children I work with that coming from a mixed heritage background can be challenging at times, but even more so when you don't really know much about where part of your heritage is from. I love that this book explores this. As I've already said, I also love how it explores the fact that adults often decide what children need to know, often using age as a means to justify the decision to withhold information. I think that we often think we are protecting people by doing this, but sometimes we are actually making things more difficult for them by increasing anxiety or making them feel like it's a secret and wrong some how. Either way, I thought this book was amazing and when I started reading it, I couldn't put it down. I just wanted to find out more and more about Lucie and the other characters in the story and I enjoyed the fact that it was told from so many people's points of view. I would thoroughly recommend this book to older readers.