Lucky Boy

April 9, 2018 11:53 AM - by Shanthi Sekaran

Soli, a young undocumented Mexican woman in Berkeley, CA, finds that motherhood offers her an identity in a world where she's otherwise invisible. When she is placed in immigrant detention, her son comes under the care of Kavya, an Indian-American wife overwhelmed by her own impossible desire to have a child. As Soli fights for her son, Kavya builds her love on a fault line, her heart wrapped around someone else's child.
posted by DirtyOldTown (2 comments total)

I finished this one this weekend. I enjoyed it tremendously, and would rank it somewhere among my top three of the year.

Initially, I took it as being written in what I am coming to think of as the NPR Fresh Air house style. That's a made-up term I use in my head for a particular kind of of-the-moment/frank/funny/mostly plainspoken, but kind of MFA artful style. I should clarify that I like that style well enough, and I view it less as a matter of convention than as a sort of zeitgeist thing. Goodbye, Vitamin was in that style, too.

But the more I dove into Lucky Boy, the more I appreciated how Sekaran was unafraid to pull back and speak in a positively Dickensian way about larger social issues. While she's never pedantic or overly literal, she's perfectly comfortable zooming back out to state frankly what she is trying to say about one aspect or another of the issues this book tackles. It was refreshing and I admired it very much.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:02 AM on May 1, 2018

Also: this book got a raw deal in ToB. If you read the review that tanked it, it seems to mostly be petty complaints about inaccuracies in the portrayal of Berkeley about which I frankly DGAF.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:03 AM on May 1, 2018