BookBrowse Reviews Lucky by Rachel Vail

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Teen girls will be surprised and touched by Lucky

Phoebe Avery has it made: she lives in a large, spotless house in an upscale development. Her intact family includes a father who teaches kindergarten; two older sisters, and a slim, confident, successful and ambitious working mother. A nanny serves meals and ferries the girls to school, to friends' homes or to the mall. Expensive clothing spills from the Avery sisters' closets; sweaters are organized by season on their shelves. Bored with her school work, Phoebe's energies are devoted to maintaining her status as a member of the school's most desirable and powerful clique of 8^th grade girls.

But despite the bland and thorough pleasantness of her life, Phoebe is often anxious. She and her girlfriends must make certain that their graduation party is the party of the year and so invent extravagance after extravagance. And Phoebe must be careful to say and do the right things, and must guard against doing or saying anything uncool enough to displease her best friend and clique queen, Kirstyn.

If Phoebe's problems seem trivial and she sounds self-absorbed, it's because she is. Phoebe inhabits a bubble within a bubble within a bubble. Friends, school and family cocoon her so tightly that it's a wonder she can breathe. But life, in all its unpredictability, energy and danger, delivers a series of penetrating blows strong enough to pierce Phoebe's complacency. When she finds herself attracted to a merely sweet, good looking-and ordinary 8^th grade boy instead of someone older, hotter and cooler, she struggles to hide her feelings from Kirstyn and herself.

Added to which, pleasing and appeasing sharp-tongued and observant Kirstyn becomes an exhausting full-time job for Phoebe. Kirstyn is unsentimental, calculating and socially ambitious; her energies are directed at securing the clique's Queen Bee status in high school in the fall. For Kirstyn, an exclusive over-the-top graduation party is the necessary vehicle for impressing the older, desirable boys who will determine their status in their new high school.

Affluent Phoebe has mastered the right, upscale effortless look. But choosing friends is dangerous and treacherous. In one of the most troubling and powerful episodes in the novel, Phoebe recalls a nightmarish third grade play date at the home of Bridget Burgess, the girl who embodies everything Phoebe and her friends don't want to be: friendless, uncool, isolated, lost. Bridget is poor, so poor that she actually walks to and from school unescorted. Her house is ramshackle, with dirty dishes in the sink; her mother is fat and unhappy and smokes cigarettes. When Bridget's mother "barks at Bridget to get her a drink," Bridget shocks and sickens Phoebe with her reply: "'All right, keep yer pants on."

Phoebe recalls the shock of that moment: ".... the thought that if we didn't hurry and get her a drink, she might actually take off her pants for some reason made me feel like I was going to throw up." Phoebe calls her father and the playdate ends early. The next day, its danger becomes clear:

"The next day in school, Kirstyn came up to me in the playground. She was the princess of third grade, already tough and cute in equal portions, and she had never particularly singled me out before that moment. 'So you're friends with Bridget Burgess?'

Gabrielle was on one side of Kirstyn, and Ann was on the other. Ann, who had been my best friend until not long before that. They were all staring at me, their tight little fists on their hips.

'No,' I said. 'I'm not."

'You had a playdate at her house yesterday after school,' Kirstyn said.

'Yeah,' I admitted, but then I made a choice—I was not getting lumped in with Bridget Burgess. I didn't even like her. I was not her friend. I knew then that what I did in the next few seconds would affect the rest of the year at least—whether I'd get my name called in the first few or last at recess kickball; whether I'd be picked as a buddy on class trips or be left to hold hands with the teacher.

It barely even felt like a choice. 'I went there," I said. 'And it was disgusting!'

A shift in Kirstyn's eyes, almost imperceptible, but not completely, told me I had chosen wisely."

Lucky works best and is most suspenseful when it is A Portrait of The Young Girl as Member of the Pack. Vail confidently and brilliantly describes the cruel dynamics of female hierarchies, their moment-to-moment coercions and sharp little miseries. The antithesis of Jerry Spinelli's quirky and individualistic heroine in Stargirl, Phoebe is still a richly developed character who grows in good and surprising ways. Still I wonder why Vail had to make Bridget Burgess's mother so repellent, and why Phoebe's world is so rich and so white. I would have liked to see Vail use her great ear for young voices to invent more diverse characters who live in a more complicated and realistic world.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in August 2008, and has been updated for the May 2009 edition. Click here to go to this issue.