kage6sha

I reviewed this for Ms. Magazine's Spring 2007 issue. Here's an excerpt of that review (you can find it in full in the magazine): We call the world small as we navigate our often technology-rich, travel-dense lives. A ping in your e-mail inbox signals an old friend who has found you on the internet, a stranger in the airplane seat next to you lived next door to your sister in college. Our lives don’t just touch each other’s, the sensation of a brushed shoulder in a train station staying with you later. Our lives influence each other’s, pressing us towards situations that some might see as good luck or bad luck but what Leila, in Christina Garcia’s A Handbook to Luck, would insist is just simply the fate written indelibly on our foreheads with invisible ink at our birth. Styled in juxtaposed narratives of three children originally living thousands of miles from each other, A Handbook to Luck follows them through twenty years of their lives as they mine the circumstances presented to them, attempt to cross the emotional and physical borders before them, and ultimately choose paths that bring them to intersect- and sometimes detach- in heartrending and soaring ways. A Handbook to Luck shines with its vulnerable characters and poetic language. The looming question once the journeys of our three protagonists have ended is how we find solace in our own lives when luck—good or bad—spins what we imagined into what we cannot possibly fathom or what we did not dare to dream.

2023-05-28 23:58