Louisiana Lucky

A richly entertaining story about three sisters who share a winning lottery jackpot that upends all their lives.

In Julie Pennell's Louisiana Lucky, three sisters from Brady, La., share a lottery jackpot of $204 million, and the outcomes result in a novel that is breezy and enjoyable, filled with charm and wit, romance and wisdom.

 

The Breaux sisters, all in their 20s, are hard-working, middle-class and bonded by family. One night a month, the lottery-playing girls gather for dinner and drinks and watch the Powerball drawing on television. Hanna, the oldest, lives with her struggling contractor husband and two kids in an inherited Victorian house in disrepair. Callie, the middle sister, is a still-single, brilliant journalist selling herself short working at a local paper. And Lexi, the youngest, is a hairdresser engaged to a vet school student with an overbearing, controlling, high-society mother. Each sister dreams of taking home the jackpot. Every month, they play two random and one predetermined number, as well as meaningful numbers selected from the heart--years parents have been married, house numbers, date they met a true love, number of kids. When their ship finally comes in, each sister takes home $68 million (before taxes), but that's when the real trouble starts. New choices and challenges upend the manageability of their former lives.

 

Pennell (The Young Wives Club) spins fresh perspective into classic adages like "be careful what you wish for" and "money is the root of all evil." She delivers a winning story--with appealing characters and a well-conceived, page-turning plot--about ordinary people changed by money in their individual ways.

Louisiana Lucky by Julie Pennell

Atria/Emily Bestler Books, $16.99 Paperback, 9781982115630, 320 pages

Publication Date: August 4, 2020

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE

 

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (August 7, 2020), link HERE

 

My Wish List

Middle-age is a time for reflection. But for Jocelyne Guerbette, the 47 year-old owner of a local haberdashery in Arras, France, the stakes grow higher when she wins an $18 million lottery jackpot. For over twenty years, Jocelyne has lived an uneventful life in "a dreary town, no airport, a grey place." She has endured the loss of a child and marital ups and downs to a handsome man, now sober, who works for Haagen-Dazs and whom Jocelyne imagines dreams of driving a Porsche and being married to a younger, thinner wife. She loves her two adult children, but they clearly have lives of their own. Tending to the shop, cultivating light-hearted friendships and caring for an infirm and much-adored father have sustained her, along with maintaining a successful blog that has enough "unique visitors" that advertisers now want space.

Jocelyne narrates author Gregoire Delacourt's compressed, evocative novel. The story is structured in short, revelatory chapters infused with an unexpected twist that speaks volumes about the nature of truth, love and happiness. When Jocelyne learns of her lottery win, she is faced with a choice—to share the news or to hide the truth? As Jocelyne reassesses the startling truths and realities of her life, she compiles lists of what she might do with the winnings. Should she buy a potato peeler? A flat screen TV? Or maybe a home by the sea? But would the money wreck the however imperfect life that Jocelyne comes to believe she deeply loves?

My Wish List by Gregoire Delacourt; translated from the French by Anthea Bell

Penguin Books,  $15.00 trade paper, 9780143124658 , 176 pp

Publication Date: March 25, 2014

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Note: This review is a reprint and is being posted (in a slightly different form) with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (4/1/14), click HERE