3 stars
“If You’re Lucky” is a young adult thriller by Yvonne Prinz due in stores this October. But it isn’t as thrilling throughout the entire book as it is for roughly 20 pages near the end, and that made it just an okay read.
Georgia is 17 and schizophrenic. When her older brother, Lucky, dies in a surfing accident in Australia — even though everyone knows he knows the water better than anyone — she’s confused and unsure of how to respond. And she’s even more confused when Fin, a way-too-perfect friend of Lucky’s enters her life, charms her and Lucky’s girlfriend and begins consuming everything of Lucky’s that he can. Even Lucky’s dog.
No one seems to suspect Fin, but Georgia does. Something’s up. She stops taking her medicine and starts trying to figure out what’s happening here. She’s breaking into Fin’s things and calling people he might have known, but she’s also losing her sanity as she goes along.
Unreliable narrators can be a scary thing for a reader — after all, you trust the narrator to tell you the truth, but can she even tell what’s real anymore? But Georgia worked. My understanding of the plot and the characters fell apart just as Georgia’s fell apart, and I came back together as she came together.
The end of the book was as thrilling as a thriller should be. I was ready to find out who this Fin was, what he was doing, who he had hurt. I needed to know. I had dozens of questions about Fin’s past, his present and his future.
Then I was halfway into the book and I realized that Prinz was going to take her sweet time giving us anything.
“If You’re Lucky” was a book full of setup, waiting and killing time. I was enticed to keep pushing forward and to find out who the crazy one here was — Fin or Georgia — but there were a few times when yet another chapter ended uneventfully that I had to persuade myself to pick the book back up.
And when everything finally happened, I had to stop and ask myself, “Wait, what?” After everything moved so slowly, I wasn’t ready for the resolution to happen so fast.
Disclaimer: Advanced copies were sent through both Algonquin Books and Flyleaf Books for reviewing purposes. Neither The Daily Tar Heel nor the writer was compensated for this review.
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