“Only If You’re Lucky”

by Stacy Willingham

It’s interesting that I managed to read two books in a row about friendship. Perhaps we all need to think about our friendships and what brings us to develop the friendships we have and what keeps those friendships healthy. I’m pretty sure that at some time in everyone’s life they develop a friendship that is unhealthy. A friendship that perhaps brings out the worst in us. That occurrence isn’t just about the other person. It’s about both people. Very often we try to heal our lives through others. We expect others to be our strength or to fill up the hole that loss or pain from childhood has left us with.  In the case of this book, Margot goes to college and replaces her dead friend from high school with a girl whose hold on her is life changing.

Margot is drawn to Lucy in what becomes an unhealthy and life altering friendship. The book goes back and forth between “before” and “after” a certain big event that everything is leading to. That event changes everyone and everything.

Margot starts out her college life as a shy, young, damaged girl from a small town only to meet Lucy who is always the center of attention, exciting, and dynamic. Margot becomes part of Lucy’s group of friends and ends up moving off campus with them in a rental house. While Lucy’s influence would probably be enough to change Margot’s life, the fraternity boys from the house next door complicate her life even more.

Margot finds herself changing. But there are things happening that keep her from totally embracing Lucy’s influence. Sometimes it seems that her past and present are coming together in disturbing ways. When a young man whom she suspected of injuring her dead high school best friend joins the freshman class at her college and moves next door, her life truly starts spinning out of control. The unhealthy relationships and holds the characters have on each other leads not just to pain for many of the characters, but to the death of some as well.

I love books that drive me to read as fast as possible to find out where the plot is going and what is the motivation behind the actions of each of the characters. This was a really fun and fascinating read.

Willingham has only written two other books, both good reads to go back to if you haven’t already read them. They are "A Flicker in the Dark" and "All the Dangerous Things."

The next book on my reading list is “A Step Past Darkness” by Vera Kurian.