I read Happy Girl Lucky back in March so I’ve had this review sitting around for a while but here I am today, finally posting it!
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Synopsis:
Sisters Hope, Faith and Mercy have everything: fame, success, money and beauty. But what Hope wants most of all is love, and it doesn’t matter how far she has to go to find it.
Except real-life isn’t like the movies. Even if you’re a Valentine. (Goodreads)
Review:
I had seen Happy Girl Lucky in Tesco and refrained from buying it so when I saw it in my local library when I was just browsing, I instantly picked it up. And truthfully, I’m glad I didn’t buy it since I don’t feel it’s book I want to necessarily own. However, that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it.
There’s only a couple of negatives I found with this book. One of them being that for most of this book, I had no idea what direction this book was going in. I did go into this book knowing nearly nothing apart from the fact it was about Hope, a girl with a famous family and she wanted love. But if I’m honest, it was far from that and was probably more about self-discovery, however the book almost misleads you to believe it’s all about love. I guess not knowing what direction a book is going in can be a good thing, but for this book, I was just left a little bit confused for the majority of it of what it was really about.
The second negative was that it did take about 100 pages for the storyline to really be introduced. It wasn’t slow as such since the writing was enjoyable, but I just felt like that first 100 pages was a big introduction to the characters.
But that being said, this book has positives too!
One of those positives was just really enjoying it despite the negatives. Holly Smale has a brilliant writing style that’s so addictive and fun, even though she was writing about some more serious topics in this book, they were light-hearted, but not in a way that dismissed the reality of things.
Hope was such a fun character to read about. She is naive and definitely very immature for a 15 year old, but it was another factor that made this story a bit more light-hearted.
That brings me on to say, like I said in my review for Geek Girl, this book is probably aimed for towards earlier teens that it is Young Adult. I think Holly Smale creates an amazing bridge between children’s and middle grade books to young adult. Holly Smale writes about an slightly older character but with a younger tone which I think is very much needed as I don’t think there is much of a bridge between children’s and young adult.
Hope has 4 siblings, all of which are different in personality. I really enjoyed this because it made the story that little bit more interesting. Their personalities were all quite strong and I found myself loving them in different ways.
A lot of this book focuses on script-like parts where Hope imagines and plans out how things are going to turn out and she often rewrites parts until it sounds perfect to her, however, what she imagines often turns out nothing like what she wants. Many of these parts I felt were important because it does go to show that we all get an idea of how we imagine things to be but then something goes wrong and shows that life really isn’t like the films portray.
I think this book deals with a few important messages at the end regarding you yourself as a person and who you are and also about relationships. While it might not be my favourite Holly Smale book, I think this will have a big impact on many of its readers.
Have you read Happy Girl Lucky? Do you plan to? Or have you read any of Holly Smale’s other books?
Lucy 🙂 x
Goodreads ||Instagram ||Twitter || Pinterest || Writing blog
Lucy and A Cup Full of Tea 