Lucky Brilliant

Lucky Brilliant is an emotive look at love, loss and friendship. Beautifully written with a strong plot and characters that are flawed but very easy to connect with,

I dd enjoy this book. It is worth noting, this book isnt telling a "tale" per say. It's more like you are a silent observer watching as Lucky deals with the death of her father and the impact it has. There is no real ending where you just know its over. we just kind of watch until Lucky seems to come to grips with this new life. That being said, it was still a very interesting read. I plowed through it in just a few hours. Lucky is super relatable.

Lucky Brilliant, also known as Lucy Brilliant, is stressed out, waiting for her dad to come home with the canvas she needs for a school project. However, her father never comes home- leaving Lucky and her mother to be plunged into a nightmare that only seems to get worse.

This was a really engaging and captivating read, once I'd started it I raced through to see what was going to happen next! It was fun and very dramatic, with lots of twists and turns. I also really liked that there was a psychic element that I didn't expect, I think it added a really nice edge to the novel.

On the other hand, there were lots of parts that felt completely unbelieveable. That feels like a weird comment to make when the plot and themes required a suspension of reality that I really enjoyed; I think it's that it tried to blend fantasy with real-world, and whilst the fantasy elements were great, the real-world parts just felt too extraordinary, and untethered to any kind of reality. It often felt quite one-sided and one-dimensional.

There were also some parts that felt pretty dubious, the Silas storyline felt a bit ableist, and there was some fatphobia throughout too. I also feel like the portrayal of Eva was a bit sexist in some ways? Less in the way she herself was written, and more in the way that Lucky viewed her.

Misgivings aside, it was a really fun read!

So very much I could post to after this week's events..AND BELIEVE ME, I'D LIKE TO 🇺🇸, but in the interest of my mental health, for now, I'm going to stick with BOOK REVIEWS!
Two reads that stood out for me this month are “Lucky Brilliant” @sherbondy.maureen and “Queenie” by @candicec_w.

I really enjoy reading YA (young adult) novels from time to time, & "Lucky Brilliant” is a great one that will be released on Sept 10. This story of a high-school aged girl who loses her father in a tragic accident had tremendous pacing that made it hard for me to put the book down (I even dragged my laptop camping because I had a digital copy that I could only access from my computer & I really didn’t want to wait to see how the book ended.) Lucky struggles with an inheirted gift that allows her to see tragic events before they happen but it feels a lot more like a curse when she starts trying to rearrange the present in an attempt to avoid her premontions coming true. This book deals realistically with loss, grief, mental illness & addiction through the eyes of a teenager, and gently reminds us that even when things aren’t perfect, they can still be good.

I'd heard various opinions on “Queenie”, the book that has been called ’”the Black Bridget Jones”, but I really, really loved it. Queenie is a young Brit who struggles to make her way in her career & in her relationships, due in large part to her own-self sabotage. It’s definitely a “modern" tale, complete with text message screen shots & email images as part of the book’s text (which I love), but is also modern in that Queenie’s sexual relationships are explicit, front and center in this book— (if that bothers you, it's not the book for you.) While not all of us have self-sabotauged with dangerous sexual relationships, self-sabotague is real and this book explores it well. It also explores racism, domestic violence and related PTSD, female friendships, & multi-generational family dynamics, but despite its handling of these weighty topics it’s in no way preachy or overly serious. I enjoyed every page!

Read a book- it's good for your mind! 🇺🇸 And a mind is a terrible thing to waste! #NetGalley #luckybrilliant

I received a copy of this book to review from Netgalley. Thank you for the opportunity.
This book reads well and easily, as it's writing is so smooth and really evokes a teenagers life. The characters are fascinating especially as the story goes on and we learn more about their backgrounds.
However, some parts of the story seemed unbelievable and like they were added to heap misery upon misery on Lucky. It made the story line melodramatic and less engaging.
On the whole an OK book.