Lucky (Marissa Chapdelaine)

Title: Lucky
Author: Alice Sebold
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Pages: 246
I decided to read this book because I have previously read the Lovely Bones and I really enjoyed it. I thought Alice Sebold’s way of writing was very different, and I wanted to try and read another book written by her. This was what had led me to reading Lucky.
This book is about Alice Sebold who is the author of Lucky. She was an eighteen year old college student at Syracuse University and only eighteen at the time. While one night she was walking back to her dorm room and she was brutally raped in an amphitheater nearby. After she was raped, and had already attempted at figuring things out with police, she decided to go home for a little while and spend time with her family. Within her family though she had her mother who always has panic attacks, her father who has always hid behind his books in times of crisis and there is her sister who is always there but only for the sake of her mother. Throughout this book Alice Sebold makes you realize how anything can happen to anyone.
I would say that this book is for juniors and seniors in high school, and also college students. I think that this is a good age group because the first ten pages are pretty intense and almost horrifying to read that anyone younger than this age group might not be able to handle it.
I think the writing style of this book is casual, and easy to read. At times though the book uses rude language to emphasis certain people characters.
“HE covered me mouth again. HE kneed me in the back of my legs so that I would fall down. You don’t get it, B****. I’ll kill you. I’ve got a knife. I’ll kill you,” (5).
One page that really stuck out to me was at the very beginning of chapter one.
“This is what I remember. My lips were cut. I bit down on them when he grabbed me from behind and covered my mouth. He said these words: I'll kill you if you scream. I remained motionless. Do you understand? If you scream you're dead. I nodded my head. My arms were pinned to my sides by his right arm wrapped around me and my mouth was covered with his left,”(5).
This passage really stuck out to me because it was the first paragraph of the whole book, and it was a very overwhelming beginning. It was nothing that I would have expected the first page of this book to be like. It gets right into the story without introducing anyone or anything. That is why it really stuck out to me, because I had never expected it, and I thought it was a very different writing style she used.
Another passage that really stuck out to me was:
“I think the way I survived in the early hours after the rape was by spiraling the obsession of how not to tell my mother over and over again in my brain. Convinced it would destroy her, I ceased thinking of what had happened to me and worried about her instead. My worry for her became my life raft. I clung to it, coming in and out of consciousness on my way to the hospital, during the internal stitches of the pelvic exam, and while the psychiatrist gave me the prescription for the very pills that had once made my mother numb,”(19).
The reason this passage stuck out to me was because it seemed so typical of every movie I have seen on this topic. It always seems that the girl is afraid to tell someone. It stuck out a lot, because even though it seemed so typical in movies and books it makes me think of everything that people go through, and how traumatizing events like this can change people lives.
I think the primary theme of this book is learning how to cope. I think that this is what Alice had to learn to do, because there was nothing in her life that could be erased. She will always be a girl who was raped and that will never leave her. S by learning to cope she can train her feelings and move on with her life. Example of theme:
“I saw my face in the mirror. I reached my hand up to touch the marks and cuts. That was me. It was also an undeniable truth: No shower would wipe the traces of the rape away,” (21).
This demonstrates the theme, because she realizes that nothing can take what happened away, and that she needs to do something about it.
“It was time. I sat with the phone in my lap. My mother was only a few miles away, having driven up the day before to take me home from Syracuse.”
This demonstrates the theme, because it shows how she is moving forward and calling her mom to let her know what had happened. This is a step to learning to cope.
I think that this book deserves a B-. I thought that the book was going to be better in a way where it was less graphic, and more on how the main character is now, and how she overcame what had happened. I even thought the beginning of the book was way too descriptive.