She Treads Softly: The Lucky One

Sunday, February 9, 2020

The Lucky One

The Lucky One by Lori Rader-Day
HarperCollins: 2/18/20
eBook review copy; 400 pages
ISBN-13: 9780062938077

The Lucky One by Lori Rader-Day is a very highly recommended novel of suspense.

Alice Fine volunteers her spare time on The Doe Pages, a website that matches missing people with unidentified remains. Her preoccupation with helping search for clues to help reunite people with their missing loved ones is a result of her own experiences. When she was three-years-old Alice was kidnapped from her backyard, and, against all odds, found by her policeman father within twenty-four hours. Alice knows how lucky she was to survive this experience without any harm, unlike so many others. When she sees the picture of a missing person on the Doe site and realizes it is a picture of her kidnapper, she begins looking for him, with help from two other Doe Pages participants. Finding him could protect others and give Alice some closure.

Merrily Cruz is another woman searching for answers about the same man. She considers him, Uncle Rick, a stepfather. Although he didn't visit her, he has been a father figure to Merrily and sporadically texts her. In their search Alice and her Doe friends come across Merrily, and the women all undertake their search for this man, whose surname changes, while trying to uncover what are lies and what is the truth.

The characters are all wonderfully flawed and believable characters that you will feel empathy for immediately. It is understood that they are all unreliable narrators. They don't know the true backstory of the man they are all looking for. We are following along in their search as they look into the past, uncovering information and clues. While following new leads they are piecing together what they learn with what they think they know.

The writing is outstanding in this well-paced novel. I was entrenched in the story and totally engrossed in the twisty plot from start to finish. The investigation the women undertake unfolds naturally as new information and clues are uncovered. Alice has other clues she is looking at related to her present life while looking into her kidnapping as a child, which adds an additional depth to the narrative. All the threads in the plot are wrapped up, although not in any way you would expect. This is an excellent novel of suspense. The final twisty denouement is what rocketed The Lucky One to my highest rating.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of HarperCollins.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.