The Higher Power of Lucky

Last night I finished reading The Higher Power of Lucky, this year’s Newbery award winner. It’s a truly wonderful story fully populated with memorably eccentric adult and juvenile characters.

Patron, Susan.

The higher power of Lucky / Susan Patron ; with illustrations by Matt Phelan. – 1st ed. – New York : Atheneum Books for Young Readers,© 2006.

134 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.

ISBN : 978-1-4169-0194-5
"A Richard Jackson book."
Awarded the 2007 John Newbery Medal by the Association of Library Services for Children, a division of the American Library Association

Subjects:
Abandoned children – California – Fiction
Interpersonal relations – Fiction
Mojave Desert (Calif.) – Fiction
JUVENILE FICTION / Family / Orphans & Foster Homes

Annotation:
Ten-year-old Lucky Trimble lives in a trailer in Hard Pan, California (pop. 43) in the northern Mojave Desert. She has a job cleaning up around the Found Object Wind Chime Museum and Visitor Center, which is where all the anonymous groups hold their meetings. She cleans up all the cigarette butts left by the recovering alcoholics so they won’t offend the recovering smokers in the Smokers Anonymous meeting, and then all their candy wrappers so the wrappers won’t offend the recovering overeaters when they meet. Lucky eavesdrops. All the people at these meetings got over the bad problems in their lives by finding a Higher Power, and Lucky wants to know how they did it because she has a bad problem. Two years ago, after her mother died, her father – who never wanted children – sent for his first ex-wife to come and take care of Lucky. Now Lucky is afraid that she is planning to leave, and Lucky will need a new mother, one that will not be so foolish as to marry a man who doesn’t want children and one cautious enough to avoid downed power lines after a thunderstorm so as to not get electrocuted.