The article about %%Keyword%%, which is currently a popular topic of Books, Is commanding substantial observance, isn’t it? At present, let’s explore some How Lucky that you may not know about in this article on Camille Di Maio!

The readers’ evaluation of the article How Lucky

Cringey and uncomfortable. This book is trying to pander to progressive ideologies, but it comes off as disingenuous, preachy, and offensive. I wouldn’t recommend it.

Before I tear this book apart, let me say what I liked about it. I loved the premise. A mystery with disability rep is right up my alley. I also loved the writing style. Daniel breaks the fourth wall to talk to us for most of the story. The short, causal sentences really made it feel like we were hearing Daniel’s thoughts. This writing style and the book’s short chapters made it propulsive and easy to read.

The actual story was meh. The mystery plot takes up only a fraction of the book. The rest of the book is spent teaching us about SMA, giving Daniel a long and needless backstory, and just following Daniel around for a week. I think this book would have done better to rebrand itself as a day-in-the-life type story and leave the mystery out of it. I did appreciate learning about SMA, but the rest just felt like filler. We learned more about random people in Daniel’s past than we learned about the kidnapper or his victim. At some points I felt as though Leitch was simply writing his friends into the novel for fun and that’s why there were so many characters that went nowhere. Also, a pet peeve of mine is when the conflict of the story is primarily due to miscommunication. Miscommunication is the only thing going on here and it’s frustrating as hell. If there wasn’t any miscommunication, the book would only be 20 pages long.

1. Disability ErasureDaniel lost the ability to speak a few years before the start of the book. He communicates with people by slowly typing out words on his computer that a robotic voice reads aloud (think Stephen Hawking). However, Daniel’s closest companions, his home health aide Marjani and his best friend Travis developed a different way of communicating with him… telepathy.

I don’t know what Leitch was thinking. This isn’t a magical realism book, it’s a realism book. I totally get and would expect close companions to intuit Daniel’s needs, but what was happening was full, complex thoughts and dialogue going back and forth between Daniel and Marjani/Travis.

This made me rageful. I do not have SMA, nor do I know anyone with SMA. I do have a disability but nothing resembling SMA. My disability never magically disappeared during crucial ‘plot points’ of my life. I don’t understand why this telepathy was even needed, couldn’t Leitch just replace “said” with “typed”? Was it that Daniel typed so slowly that he couldn’t effectively communicate what was needed in the allotted time for the story? As if he had… a disability?

2. Preachiness & Not Your Story to TellAs said earlier, I did appreciate learning about SMA, but I was aggravated by the multitude of passages telling us how society treated Daniel so differently and poorly. It felt like a generic after-school special about inclusion. Part of me agreed with everything that was being said. I mean, who wouldn’t agree that we need to be a more tolerant society? Who doesn’t need to self-reflect on their own privilege?

But another part of me was like, dude, you magically erased this guy’s disability because it was difficult for you to write about, so… STFU. Also, everything that was being said was very generic. You could replace ableism with any other -ism and it wouldn’t have made much of a difference. It was at this point that I googled Leitch’s connection with SMA; his young son has a friend with the disease. In my opinion, nobody should write an authoritative, firsthand account about what it’s like to be part of a marginalized group, if you’re not in that group.

3. Ableist LanguageI’ll give you an example. Daniel, who has used a wheelchair his entire life, is describing Travis as being talkative, so much so that people usually get worn out and just leave the conversation. Here’s the analogy Daniel goes with:

It’s like “the way you wait for an elevator too long, realize it’s never coming, and just take the stairs.”

4. Woke Tokenism & Still Being OffensiveThis whole book feels like it’s trying to be woke but in actuality it was being offensive. Great, your main character is disabled, don’t take away his disability. The girl who was kidnapped was Asian; the book has a few throw away lines about how the outcry for a white girl would have been greater, but that’s literally it. The entire conflict of the book is based around her kidnapping but we learn little about her. It felt as though her race was merely used as a shallow plot device, which is gross.

There were a few lines about fighting the patriarchy, but by-and-large the book spoke about women in such a demeaning fashion. At one point, Leitch even refers to women as “foals”. 🤢

Everything just felt so thoughtless that even innocent comments made me livid. Like when Daniel was wondering if Marjani (who is muslim, wears a headscarf, and abstains from alcohol) was in the kitchen cooking bacon.

5. ReferencesThis is petty compared to everything else I wrote but I’m gonna add it in here anyway because it took me out of the book constantly- the old pop culture references. Daniel is 26 years old in 2019; the pop culture references he uses make him sound like he’s a grandpa. If Daniel was a movie buff or 1980’s pop culture aficionado, the references would make sense, but he’s not. I have never heard a young millennial/ old gen z person talk like this. I didn’t understand a single reference. I looked up half of them and figured the other half would just be an inside joke I would never understand… and the football references, omg, like water torture.👭