An official Book of the Month Club selection.
In Erika Carter's fierce and darkly funny debut novel, Lucky You, three women in their early twenties find themselves aimlessly adrift in the Arkansas college town they've stuck around in too long. Ellie, Chloe, and Rachel are friends (sort of), waitresses at the same dive bar. Each is becoming unmoored in her own way: Ellie obliterates all feeling with alcohol and self-destructive acts of sexual promiscuity; Chloe pulls out patches of her hair and struggles to keep incipient mental illness at bay; changeable Rachel has fallen under the sway of a messianic boyfriend with whom she's agreed to live off-grid for a year in order to return to "health", and she asks Ellie and Chloe to join them in "The Project." In a remote, rural house in the Ozarks, nearly undone by boredom and the brewing tension between them, each tries to solve the conundrum of being alive.
By turns funny, knowing and hauntingly sad, Lucky You is a study in damage and detachment, a fearless portrait of three women at a crucial point in their lives. With startling exactitude and wickedly deadpan humor, it lays bare the emotional core of its characters with surgical precision. The writing is deft and controlled, as natural and unforced as breath--which makes it impossible to look away.
Genre: Literary Fiction
In Erika Carter's fierce and darkly funny debut novel, Lucky You, three women in their early twenties find themselves aimlessly adrift in the Arkansas college town they've stuck around in too long. Ellie, Chloe, and Rachel are friends (sort of), waitresses at the same dive bar. Each is becoming unmoored in her own way: Ellie obliterates all feeling with alcohol and self-destructive acts of sexual promiscuity; Chloe pulls out patches of her hair and struggles to keep incipient mental illness at bay; changeable Rachel has fallen under the sway of a messianic boyfriend with whom she's agreed to live off-grid for a year in order to return to "health", and she asks Ellie and Chloe to join them in "The Project." In a remote, rural house in the Ozarks, nearly undone by boredom and the brewing tension between them, each tries to solve the conundrum of being alive.
By turns funny, knowing and hauntingly sad, Lucky You is a study in damage and detachment, a fearless portrait of three women at a crucial point in their lives. With startling exactitude and wickedly deadpan humor, it lays bare the emotional core of its characters with surgical precision. The writing is deft and controlled, as natural and unforced as breath--which makes it impossible to look away.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"Lucky You is not only a superb novel, it heralds a strong and authentic new voice among us. From here on out, I will read whatever Erika Carter writes!" - Andre Dubus III
"Lucky You is an utterly captivating novel, written in precise, surprising sentences with a charge so electric they snap across the page like lightning." - Benjamin Hale
"The most beautiful novels read like fevered whispers, a shared secret, and Carter's prose lingers like that. For a book that features haikus, the novel has some of that style, desperately distilling life down to our dreams and desires." - Joshua Mohr
"By turns dark and funny, Lucky You is a stunningly honest novel about the inner lives of three women. Sexy, risky, with a pleasurably dangerous tension. Erika Carter's writing is effortlessly remarkable." - Janis Cooke Newman
"Lucky You is an utterly captivating novel, written in precise, surprising sentences with a charge so electric they snap across the page like lightning." - Benjamin Hale
"The most beautiful novels read like fevered whispers, a shared secret, and Carter's prose lingers like that. For a book that features haikus, the novel has some of that style, desperately distilling life down to our dreams and desires." - Joshua Mohr
"By turns dark and funny, Lucky You is a stunningly honest novel about the inner lives of three women. Sexy, risky, with a pleasurably dangerous tension. Erika Carter's writing is effortlessly remarkable." - Janis Cooke Newman
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