Back in May, I received How Lucky by Will Leitch from the Book of the Month club, and I feel incredibly lucky to have picked this one to be my choice over the summer. For those who aren’t familiar with Book of the Month (BoTM), it is a book club subscription that charges $15.99 each month and allows you to pick one out of five of their top picks for that month. I’ve been a member since 2019, and I’ve enjoyed just about each of my picks over the past two years. This year, How Lucky is my favorite novel so far, and I want to discuss more about it.
Before I go into How Lucky, I want to share a bit more on my BoTM Subscription. Overall, I have found a lot of amazing books from that club. Aside from How Lucky, some of my favorites have been Nine Perfect Strangers, which is now a show on HBOMax and The Astonishing Color of After. This club has personally helped me and others out a ton in keeping up with my reading schedule, and it also helps me find new writers to read almost every month. The club is worth it to me, and if it weren’t for BoTM, I wouldn’t have found some of these new writers to read more of over these past two years!
Before I ramble on about Book of the Month, though, let’s go through what How Lucky is about. How Lucky is about a disabled man named Daniel who lives in Athens, Georgia, and works for a regional airline online that pays him well. He has close friends and orderlies that check up on him constantly, and is living a fairly satisfying, content life, despite being confined to his house most of the time. Everything changes one day when a young college student named Ai-Chin is kidnapped on his street, and he witnesses the whole thing happen. Since Daniel is mostly mute and physically disabled, he attempts to find a way to solve this mystery and find out what happened to the kidnapped girl.
Written in a first-person narrative, this book portrays the struggles of a man physically affected by Type 2 SMA (spinal muscular atrophy). I found myself getting attached to the protagonist instantly. He talked about the difficulties he faced with SMA, but also how he felt about the people taking care of him. There were a lot of relatable topics that the reader can empathize with Daniel, which is something that representation for disabled people really needs. Representation needs empathy for it to truly work, and Leitch nails it with the character of Daniel. The reader is taken on a journey through Daniel’s mind as he plots a way to find out what happened to Ai-Chin, but we also get some chapters that are flashbacks to Daniel’s past. He talks about his mother’s dedication to taking care of him, despite all the pain and grief she went through, and also about his childhood best friend, Travis, who also lives in Athens and visits Daniel almost every day.
Not only is the representation for physically disabled people a strength of this novel, but so is the way this book tackles issues revolving around Chinese transfer students. Ai-Chin is a nineteen-year-old Chinese college student that gets kidnapped off the street by accepting a ride from a stranger. She walked by Daniel’s home every day, and he had become familiar with seeing her each morning, and that was when the kidnapping felt out of place to him. When she was proclaimed as “missing” the next day, that’s when Daniel knew something was off instantly. Unfortunately, the police and the university hadn’t done much to find her, and were more fixated on saving their reputation guarding the manners. Ai-Chin’s roommate and several other Chinese representatives go out of their way to address these issues, as a way to protest that her life matters just as much as the American lives that get taken.
Not only is this book well-written, but it focuses a lot on social issues that don’t always cross our minds on a daily basis. It’s mind-opening, and Daniel’s narration is quite entertaining to read through.
Personally, I felt this book was a pretty fast read. While most of the action doesn’t pick up till the end, there is so much character building and flashbacks that the novel felt somewhat fast-paced, but enjoyable nonetheless. I also learned a lot about SMA, which I didn’t know before until after I read this book. It’s informative, engaging, and entertaining overall.
How Lucky by Will Leitch is an excellent novel filled with great representation for disabilities and Chinese student issues, and I recommend you give it a read!
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