Title : Windfall, by Jennifer E. Smith. Delacorote, Penguin Random House, 2017. $24.99 ages
link : Windfall, by Jennifer E. Smith. Delacorote, Penguin Random House, 2017. $24.99 ages
Windfall, by Jennifer E. Smith. Delacorote, Penguin Random House, 2017. $24.99 ages
When the lottery ticket Alice gives to Teddy, the boy she’s secretly loved for years, wins him a fortune, they discover money really does change everything.Orphaned at 9, Alice has grown up in Chicago with a loving family: her dad’s brother, Uncle Jake; his Latina wife, Aunt Sofia; and their son, Leo. Uncle Jake—white and fair, like Alice, is a painful reminder of her dad. Struggling to live the life she believes her parents would have chosen, remembering them as passionate altruists, Alice tutors an orphaned foster child and volunteers at a soup kitchen, refusing emphatically when Teddy, who is also white, tries to share his winnings with her. For years, since his gambling-addicted father wiped out their savings, Teddy and his mother have shared a cramped apartment. Generous and impulsive, spending lavishly, Teddy enjoys his new fame. Leo, who feels unjustifiably blessed, having lucked out with great parents (they even made coming out as gay easy), views Teddy’s win as just compensation for a bad-luck childhood, whereas Alice refuses to see good or bad fortune as anything but random. Now, unable to prevent the changes fortune brings, she must learn to weather them. While the feel-good ending feels forced—a shoe that doesn’t quite fit—this compelling read, gracefully told, raises issues seldom explored in popular fiction. How can we rationalize life’s inequalities? What do we owe, and to whom, when blessed with good fortune? Smart and entertaining, as to be expected from Smith. \
Alice’s life has been defined by a desire to honor her parents’ legacy since her parents died and she was taken in by her uncle and aunt. When she gives her best friend (and maybe more) Teddy a lottery ticket for his eighteenth birthday, she is stunned when he wins fifty-three million dollars on the numbers she picked. Complementing the story of Teddy’s negotiation of this new status is the focus on Alice’s slow realization that she has been organizing her life around what she thinks were her activist parents’ dreams. As Alice tries to even Teddy’s keel, damp down her feelings for him, and open herself up to her own happiness, Teddy comes to terms with his feelings about his estranged, gambling-addicted father and attempts to transform himself into a more serious person. As this is primarily Alice’s story, however, other characters serve more as props to her arc. In a kind of reversal of the manic pixie dream girl trope, serious Alice challenges the frivolous Teddy to do something meaningful with his winnings, with the result that he proposes starting a nonprofit dedicated to funding small, random acts of charity, an outcome steeped in implausibility. Overall, this is a solid, if somewhat predictable and tropey, coming-of-age friendship/romance novel.
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