The Luckiest Girl isn't strong on plot, but like Fifteen the author makes her main character be honest with herself and own her mistakes and her bad choices, even if sometimes it's only internal. He also coaches the high school basketball team and runs an orange grove. Tom that makes his daughter practice the piano, Tom that tells his kids when it's time for bed. It's Tom that rounds up the family to do the washing, then the ironing. Tom is especially enlightened even by today's standards.

I also got a big kick out of reading the scenes that involved Shelly with her host family, Mavis and Tom. I feel like lately I'm surrounded by people who are only interested in judging and questioning my differences (expat) instead of enjoying (or hell, I'd just take respecting) them, so I think Shelly's attitude particularly stood out and struck a chord for me. Shelly's wonder and openness about a new place, a new style of living, meeting new people - all of it was inspiring. Desperate over the idea that her life is never going to change she begs her mom to allow her to go.ĭecades later I still really like this book. Coincidentally, that same morning her mother received a letter from her old college roommate, inviting Shelly to come live with her and her family for the school year in California. In a fit of pique after an argument over a rain slicker one morning, she shoves her mother's roses down the garbage disposal.

Shelly is an only child with a helicopter mom and a typically 50's dad in Oregon. Then I was cleaning up some book records and there is was. Flashes of scenes would pop into my head at random moments here and there and I started to think I'd need to hunt down the book to re-read it. Show More although I'd long forgotten the title and the author.

All in all, The Luckiest Girl is an utterly charming read. There are a surprising number of layers to Shelley's story, despite its apparent simplicity-Cleary tackles school, ambition, homesickness, mother-daughter relationships, and most of all boys, with confidence.

Otherwise, the supporting cast feels startlingly real. A few sections featuring Katie, the daughter of Shelley's host parents, feel a bit like the slapstick of the Ramona books while I love those, wearing vegetables on one's head is more believable in an eight-year-old than a thirteen-year-old. But Cleary paints a very vivid landscape, and populates it with equally vivid people. This makes her journey in California, and her trials in early dating, surprisingly readable.Written in 1958, this is certainly a quaint book, written in a time when contractions, or more than a chaste kiss at the novel's conclusion, were apparently taboo. But Shelley is an incredibly endearing character-sweet, but not saccharine inquisitive, but not naive.

The Luckiest Girl by Beverly Cleary