In school, she learns accurate natural history, brain physiology, and evolution. She overhears stories and secrets, and encounters the idea of a Higher Power, for which she immediately begins to search.

In her job cleaning up at the Found Object Wind Chime Museum and Visitor Center, Lucky gets to eavesdrop on three different Twelve Step meetings: for alcoholics, for smokers, for overeaters. Brigitte speaks French, a language which alternately fascinates and repels Lucky.

It is, for Lucky, a treasure house of information and insight. But, though adult readers know that this is a poor place, the text never presents the town as poor. Only a few people in the town have jobs most live on welfare or pensions. Like its soil, the town looks hard and ungenerous: a cluster of trailers and patched-together houses. The novel takes place in Hard Pan, an old mining town named for the way the ground resists miners digging down to the silver. Brigitte is satisﬁed, and the snake is safe. Lucky tapes the door shut and bangs on the lid until it leaves through the vent. Brigitte freaks out about a snake in the dryer. Throughout the novel, characters solve problems with similar economy and elegance. No one is going to fuss about “vandalizing public property,” confronted with two accurately placed dots. Lincoln’s solution preﬁgures the actions in the book in another way: it is elegant, economical, and appropriate. They quickly and obsessively synthesize information to make meaning: maps to navigate by, words for communication, and models for how to be themselves. People help each other out by helping them understand. A person discovers how to proceed by reading signs. This small episode sounds the themes of this ﬁne book. The sign says: “Slow Children at Play.” Miles, a beginning reader intensely interested in signs, has asked Lincoln about this sign does it mean that children in Hard Pan move slowly, or that they are stupid? Lincoln changes the sign to read, “Slow: Children at Play.” Lucky calls the change “Presidential.” Her mother has been killed in a freak accident, her father is missing, and she is being cared for by her father’s former girlfriend, Brigitte, in a tiny town at the edge of the California desert.Įarly in the story, Lucky’s friend Lincoln (so named because his parents want him to be President) asks her to bring a black marker and meet him by a sign on the school bus route. This middle grade novel, which won the Newbery Medal, is about a ten-year-old girl, Lucky.

Originally published in Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children 18(4): 1. Review of The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron (New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2006).

The higher power of lucky book