Summer of My Amazing Luck

By Miriam Toews

Book Overview

"[A] memorable portrait of a struggling young person who finds unexpected resilience and peace . . . Hilarious, heartbreaking, and poignant." --Booklist

From the author of Women Talking--now an Academy Award-winning film starring Claire Foy, Rooney Mara, Frances McDormand, and Jessie Buckley

Miriam Toews welcomes her readers to the Have-a-Life housing project (better known as Half-a-Life). The welfare regulations are endless and the rate-fink neighbors won't mind their own business. Lucy Von Alstyne sends fictitious letters to her friend Alicia, pretending to be the father of Alicia's twins. When the two mothers and their five children set off on a journey to find him, facing along the way the complications of living in poverty and raising fatherless children, Lucy discovers this just may be the summer of her amazing luck.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1640091858
• ISBN13: 9781640091856
• Release Date: April 2019
• Publisher: Counterpoint LLC
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.0" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Great book!

I loved, loved this book. Took me awhile to get through but only because I wanted to savour it. The first half of the book introduces each wacky character in Half-a-Life. The second half deals with Lish and Lucy's advenure to find Gotcha. This is a different, entertaining, and really cute book that I would read again and again.

Single mothers' Canadian club

Lucy, the first person narrator, and Lish are unwed mothers living in public housing in Winnipeg, Manitoba, a place where Fargo is considered the warm south. Lucy does not know the father of her child because "if you eat a whole can of beans how can you tell which one gave you gas." There are so many unfathered children in the building that their version of the alphabet song is "ABCDEFGHIJKalimony please". Both Lucy and Lish have difficult relationships with conventional respectable unsupportive (in the emotional sense) fathers of their own. These relationships form a faint thread of a plot, although the novel is largely made up of the intersecting stories of the other mothers in the building. I was reminded of Adrian Leblanc's serious non-fiction "Random Family." That's a great book but Toew's is better, and actually contains more information about the singles mother's predicament, and offers more insight into her motivation, as well as being hilariously funny.. Once again we have a great Canadian female writer. Why is Canada the only country where a list of the top five writers cannot be made up that is not predominantly female?

Miriam Toew's First Novel is an unlikely vehicle for humour

Summer of My Amazing Luck, Miriam Toew's first novel, tells the story of single mothers who inhabit the fictional "Have-A-Life"- (A.K.A."Half-A-Life") welfare project in downtown Winnipeg. Single mom's on welfare seems an unlikey basis for humour, but Summer of My Amazing Luck, shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Humour Prize in 1997, is gut-busting, laugh-out-loud hilarity. Told through the eyes of eighteen-year-old Lucy, who lives at "Half-a-Life" with her baby boy "Dillinger", we meet the Lucy's older, more worldly confident, the eccentric Lish, who's raising three young daughters, and is in deparate search for her one true love, a fire-eater from Colorado, the father of her twins.On the backdrop of Winnipeg's mosquito infested rainy season, Lucy and Lish try to make homes for their children, and find love and contentment in their own lives; we pity, admire and love them for it. Summer of My Amazing Luck is a wonderful book, and a tribute to mothers everywhere.