Summer of My Amazing Luck

Summer of My Amazing Luck

By: Miriam Toews
Random House of Canada; http://www.randomhouse.ca/

Lucy, a young mother, moves in to "Half-a-Life", a government subsidized housing complex in Winnipeg with her infant son. She slowly becomes familiar with her neighbours, mostly other single mothers "on the dole". She observes their lives and their beliefs, exploring her own feelings as she shares her accounts, her story punctuated with the comic irony she sees in their situations, and more and more, in her own situation. Lucy wonders what it feels like to be in a relationship and looks at love with a mix of cynicism and hopeful idealism. She's just going along for the ride, not really knowing what she wants in life and waiting for something to happen, hoping for something to happen, until she makes a mistake that changes her outlook on everything.

Read this if you: Appreciate clever humour and find life's ironies funny.

Don't read this if you: Always wanted to be a poor mother on welfare.

The mood you need to be in: Ready to get dirty, get wet and sing in the rain.

Read it while you're: Sitting in a neighbourhood where you can watch people go by and wonder about their lives.

The best part: Lucy's explanation of why she named her son after John Dillinger.

Other books on your nightstand: A Complicated Kindness, also by Toews, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, The Making of an American Quilt by Whitney Otto, Luck by Joan Barfoot

Words to live by: "What have we got to lose?"

In a nutshell: Summer of My Amazing Luck is a clever and inspiring book about people who, at first glance, you wouldn't think could have so much life.

By: Miranda Leigh