The Higher Power of Lucky

Ten year old Lucky Trimble lives in Hard Pan, California, population forty three, in a trailer she shares with Brigitte, her father's French first wife, whom he summoned from France to look after Lucky when her mother died, and Lucky spends most of the book quietly terrified that Brigitte, whose suitcase she has found already packed, is planning to abandon her and go home to France. Lucky works odd jobs around town and eavesdrops on twelve step meetings held at the local bar, hoping to learn the secret of finding a higher power the way the adults in the meetings describe finding theirs, since she wants exactly that kind of steadying force in her own life. When her fear finally overwhelms her, Lucky runs away during a desert sandstorm with her dog HMS Beagle, and along the way she finds five year old Miles, lost in the same storm, and shelters with him inside an abandoned mine dugout until Lincoln, another Hard Pan kid obsessed with tying complicated knots, tracks them down. Before the book's end Lucky scatters her mother's ashes in a small ceremony the whole town turns out for, and Brigitte, confronted at last, reveals that the packed suitcase held adoption papers rather than a ticket home; she intends to legally adopt Lucky and open a French restaurant right there in Hard Pan.

Patron writes Hard Pan as a real, specific, sun scoured place, and the book's humor sits close to real grief throughout, since Lucky's fear of abandonment never gets played as anything less serious than it is. It reads quickly for its age group and suits a reader who likes an eccentric small town cast more than plot, though its frankness about a child's fear of being left behind gives it more weight than its light tone first suggests.