LUCKY YOU

By Carl Hiaasen

This month we discussed Carl Hiaasen's 'LUCKY YOU' and the discussion of the book was led by Felicia who did an excellent job of bringing us some biographical information about Mr. Hiaasen as well as some excellent discussion questions that rapidly filled up our time together.

It was interesting for us to discover that the author is a columnist for a newspaper in Florida and says that he is surprised that people find his books funny. He is after satirical and biting. However his characters are so far over the top that what most readers discover are south Florida cartoon characters, just too unbelievably weird to live anywhere, let alone in our United States. On the other hand, one of our members who lived in the area said that she could find many similarities with characters in this book and those she met there.

This books main plot line involves a woman and a man who each win the state lottery to the tune of $14 million each. The man, who is characterizied pretty much as a redneck cracker and his two members recruited to the new Aryan movement he is intending to fund with his winnings has decided that the other half of the lottery should be his, too. In their bumbling but deadly pursuit of this goal they assualt the woman and take the lottery ticket. A newspaper reporter befriends the woman and in the ensuing recovery process of the ticket is crowded in the plot by a swarm of unbelievably weird citizens of a town who make a living from even weirder evengelical Christian tourists, a senior editor from the paper who finds God in this town, a murdering judge, philandering judge's wife, a wife who won't get divorced, and other odd and assorted folk sprinkled in along the way.

As a group some of us took a dim view of the stretching of this plot into a full novel by adding more and more cartoons while others were able to relate to this tale of Florida's native population. Fortunately, we had a new member with us who had read several other Hiaasen books who thought this was perhaps, not his best book. With a low of one star and a high of 3-1/2 stars, we ended up giving this book this final rating as a group: