The Good Luck Girls Book Review
The Good Luck Girls by Charlotte Nicole Davis
From Goodreads: Aster, the protector
Violet, the favorite
Tansy, the medic
Mallow, the fighter
Clementine, the catalyst
THE GOOD LUCK GIRLS
The country of Arketta calls them Good Luck Girls–they know their luck is anything but. Sold to a “welcome house” as children and branded with cursed markings. Trapped in a life they would never have chosen.
When Clementine accidentally murders a man, the girls risk a dangerous escape and harrowing journey to find freedom, justice, and revenge in a country that wants them to have none of those things. Pursued by Arketta’s most vicious and powerful forces, both human and inhuman, their only hope lies in a bedtime story passed from one Good Luck Girl to another, a story that only the youngest or most desperate would ever believe.
It’s going to take more than luck for them all to survive.
Trigger warning: This book contains attempted rape and forced prostitution.
First up, thanks so much to Hot Key Books for sending me an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.
I was hoping to post this review before the book came out at the start of October. Unfortunately, it’s been another hectic month of uni work and sometimes my brain just refuses to do any work after a long day of academia.
Anyhow, on with the review.
The Good Luck Girls starts off strong and immediately drew me in. Without getting too spoilery, one of the main characters, Clementine, gets into a really intense situation that made me care a lot about her, straight from the beginning. It’s an interesting technique, one that sometimes pays off, and sometimes makes me feel like the author is trying too hard, but it works so well here. It’s not gimmicky, it’s raw and real and terrifying.
And the introduction serves so well to highlight the glorious feminist themes of this book. While I’ve seen a lot of YA books which have feminist messages, and even analysed a few of them for my PhD, I was delighted to discover just how strong the messages in this book were. Davis doesn’t pull any punches with it, she doesn’t hold back one jot, and that’s really something I never knew I was craving in a YA book until now. In particular, I really love that we get diversity in this book too, in a way which feels completely natural to the story, rather than something that comes across as a tokenistic gesture.
One of the other things I loved about The Good Luck Girls was the unique setting. Although I didn’t always get a perfect sense of where we were at all times, and there were some moments where it felt a little white-spacey,
To me, some of the characters were very detailed and felt real. Violet was complex and layered and I liked seeing how every thing I learned about her felt like a discovery. Aster, too, felt like someone who I connected with very quickly. Although I initially felt for Clem, and wanted to see where her story took her, I felt she faded into the background a little bit after the first few chapters. This was kinda disappointing, especially since we get a lot of Aster’s perspective, so it would have been nice to see a bit more of that sister bond they have and see more of Clem through Aster’s eyes. We do get some sense of her, but I came away from this book not knowing all that much about her. Tansy and Mallow, too, don’t have all that much ‘screen’ time in this book. Well, they do, but it’s very clear that they’re secondary characters, and although they appear in much of the narrative, they don’t speak often and there’s little that we discover about them that we didn’t know early on in the story. I do like seeing how the girls all bond on their journey, but I felt like the novel was pitched as this awesome cool girl gang, and for me personally, if that’s the road you’re going down, all the characters have to be detailed and fleshed out.
My other [slight] gripe about The Good Luck Girls is the fantasy elements. I thought the tattoos were a cool touch and made a lot of sense in the novel, but the book could have done with spending a bit more time actually explaining or showing some of the different creatures that occupy this world. I got the sense that a lot of them were scary, and you wouldn’t want to be chased by them, but that was kind of it. Which was a bit of an issue because it meant when the characters were actually getting chased by these monsters, I didn’t feel as intensely on the edge of my seat as I should have. There were moments when I did a bit of a victory air punch, moments when I was biting my nails with stress, but those moments happened when the girls encountered the human monsters of this book.
Overall, I’d give The Good Luck Girls:
I loved the setting and the feminist vibes of the book, but some of the characters weren’t detailed enough for me and faded into the background a bit. However, I definitely think this book is worth a read, and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it.
Has anyone else read this book already or plans to? What do you all think of it? Let me know in the comment section down below ❤
