Summer of My Amazing Luck [Paperback]

Miriam Toews (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 1996

Welcome to Have-a-Life housing project... better nown as Half-a-Life.

Meet eighteen year-old Lucy and flamboyant Lish, two of the single moms whhol live there. Lucy has no idea who the father of her son is. Lish has four girls, and though she says she doesn't want a man around, she still pines for the father of her twins, a fire-eating busker who was just passing through town. Every Friday is "Deadbeat Dads" visiting day, but otherwise fathers aren't around much at Half-a-Life. They're mostly the kind of people whose heads get chopped off in pictures.

Life at Half-a-Life has its ups and downs. The welfare regulations are endless and the ratfink neighbours won't mind their own business. Wagons and cheap strollers are the only way to get to and from the grocery store, and its hard to make ends meet without the welfare minister trying to take away the child tax credit. So when Lish decides they should go to Colorado to find the fire-eater, Lucy can't help but be excited. They borrow a van held together with coat hangers and electrical tape, load it up with clothes and hit the road. Lucy knows they'll never find the fire-eater, but she doesn't know this will be the summer of her amazing luck.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Originally published in Canada in 1996, this light treat by the author of A Complicated Kindness and A Boy of Good Breeding sees 18-year-old single mother Lucy Van Alstyne join the nouveau poor on the dole in Winnipeg, Manitoba. At a public housing complex nicknamed Half-A-Life, mothering is the noblest calling and absent fathers are as relevant as orbiting "space junk." Lucy doesn't know which of "eight or nine" fleeting lovers fathered her infant son, Dillinger (named after John Dillinger, who Lucy insists is a lucky man and still alive); her fast friend Alicia fantasizes about reuniting with the fire-eating juggler who got her pregnant with twins during a one-night stand several years earlier. Lucy fabricates letters to Alicia from the fire-eater, and the two women and their five kids set off to search for him. The novel offers a humorous look at the absurdities of the Canadian welfare system while unwinding the intricacies of a sticky-sweet friendship. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

From Booklist

Eighteen-year-old Lucy isn't sure who the father of her nine-month-old son, Dillinger, is: "Usually, I just enjoyed Dill without wondering how exactly he got here." Her closest friend is wild, dynamic Lish, a young mother who, like Lucy, lives on the dole in a Winnipeg housing project. In a voice that's vulnerable, observant, and deadly funny, Lucy describes a summer among the projects' eccentric residents: the hippies, who heal earaches with onions; the refugees of abusive and lost love; and open, bohemian Lish, who helps Lucy face her own sorrows and confusions. The author of A Complicated Kindness (2004) and A Boy of Good Breeding (2006) offers another memorable portrait of a struggling young person who finds unexpected resilience and peace: "That should be the mark of success . . . just a general feeling of happiness," says Lucy. While the vivid scenes don't add up to a cohesive whole, readers will return to the hilarious, heartbreaking dialogue and the poignant questions about finding love, making a life, and discovering how stories and secrets impact others. Gillian Engberg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Turnstone Press; 2nd Printing edition (December 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0888012055
• ISBN-13: 978-0888012050
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,295,624 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Miriam Toew's First Novel is an unlikely vehicle for humour, May 10, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Summer of My Amazing Luck (Paperback)

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.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting. Everything but the kitchen sink included., January 14, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Summer of My Amazing Luck (Paperback)

Two single mothers living hand-to-mouth grapple with their desires to be loved and accepted and the relentless search for meaning in life. Ranges from humorous to pathetic. Leaves the reader with understanding, pity, and possibly even admiration for the unlikely heroines.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Single mothers' Canadian club, December 21, 2006

By 

D. P. Birkett (Suffern, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Summer of My Amazing Luck: A Novel (Paperback)

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?