How Lucky

I'll be honest, I had mixed feelings about this one. I felt like nothing about the novel really stood out to me, or truly EXCEEDED my expectations. Don't get me wrong, there were a lot of good things about the book— the characters were funny and well thought-out, the mystery was compelling and exciting (who took Ai-Chin? Is she dead or alive?), the pacing/writing style was enjoyable, and the cast showed some really good diversity.

However, I felt like all of the aspects that made the book “good” to me, fell short in pretty crucial ways which prevented the book from being a truly GREAT read. For example, our main character, Daniel, suffers from Type 2 Spinal Muscular Atrophy, or SMA. This debilitating disease prevents Daniel from living his life without assistance. While clearly Leitch did his research on SMA, the fact that Leitch himself is able-bodied (for me) made the writing feel a bit inauthentic. Now, of course we can argue for days on the “can authors write characters from backgrounds different than their own?” Question, but it's not even that I felt like he SHOULDN'T write from this perspective. Instead, it just felt like Leitch's approach to the character and his SMA needed to be about five layers deeper to be compelling.

The killer/kidnapping/Ai-chin storyline also felt... about five layers less deep than it needed to be for me to TRULY get behind it. Like, Ai-chin is supposed to be an international student visiting in the US from China. Ok great, but what about it? With only passing mentions of her race/background as an international student (“her English is bad, but she's working on it” kind of thing), it felt like her character was kind of one-dimensional, and was only international to be hip with the times.

That being said, I did enjoy the book, and recommend it as a beach/airport read for folks looking to pass the time. Nothing about the book was overtly offensive from my perspective, it just felt like it wasn't quite a DEEP read. But that also could very much be the whole point and I'm just some overly sensitive blogger ;)