Lucky You

Starred review from September 29, 1997
The Florida jokester has come up with his funniest caper yet in this novel about a lottery winner and the evil attentions she attracts from some of the grungiest lowlifes ever to see print. JoLayne Lucks is a cheery vet's assistant in tiny Grange, Fla., with a tender disposition and a no-nonsense attitude toward men. Into her life falls a winning divided lottery ticket worth $14 million, which she treats so nonchalantly that the town, desperate for a little attention for some reason other than its weeping Virgin Mary statue and a man who has drilled stigmata through his hands and feet for the Christian tourist trade, can hardly tell whether she won or not. (JoLayne actually wants to use the money to buy a local wilderness area and keep it for its resident wild creatures.) A newspaper reporter, Tom Krome, gets on the story, and so, unfortunately, do Bodean Gazzer and his friend Chub, the heart (and only members) of an "anti-gummint," white-supremacist, Bud-guzzling militia who, when not spreading their gospel, are respectively poaching lobsters and counterfeiting handicapped parking stickers. This unsavory pair also won on the split ticket with JoLayne; but figuring that she, being black, doesn't deserve her half, they take it off her. JoLayne's efforts, with Tom's help, to get the ticket back are the heart of the story. But it also expands to embrace holy turtles; Virgin malfunctions; Tom's wife, who will do anything to escape being served with divorce papers; young Shiner, who wants to be a member of Bode and Chub's outfit; and the beauteous Amber, a limber waitress at Hooters cafe whose orange shorts set several hearts afire. The pace is crackling, the dialogue, especially among the rednecks, is fall-down funny, and the spirit is sweet and offbeat. 200,000 first printing; BOMC and QPB alternates; Random House audio.

July 1, 1997
A lucky lottery winner in Grange, Florida, gets mad--and then gets even--when two thugs who won half the pot get greedy and steal her ticket, too.

September 15, 1997
Winning the lottery is the quintessential surreal experience for the nineties, and nowhere in the U.S. could it be more surreal than in Florida--and who better to describe the experience than Carl Hiaasen, master of sunshine noir, that twisted mix of black comedy, theater of the absurd, and trailer-park terror. Sharing $28 million worth of lottery money with the holder of one other winning ticket wouldn't seem to be much of a burden to bear, but it is for Bodean Gazzer and his pal Chub, who crave all the cash to launch their own personal hate group, the White Clarion Aryans. The other winner, a black woman named JoLayne Lucks, plans to use her money to save a patch of Florida swamp, but that's before the Aryans assault her and steal the ticket. With the help of maverick journalist Tom Krome, JoLayne attempts to steal it back. Along the way, the pair must deal with a flock of religious crazies populating the small town of Grange, home of a weeping fiberglass Madonna and a road-stain face of Jesus. In typical Hiaasen fashion, a couple of regular folks are pitted against an absurd world gone homicidal. This time, though, the low comedy overshadows the lurking terror, taking the Hieronymous Bosch edge off things and replacing it with a low-rent screwball romance: a multicultural Hepburn and Tracy battle a racist version of the Three Stooges. It's wildly clever and often hysterically funny, but Hiaasen fans may miss the less-apparent dark side. Call it beige comedy. ((Reviewed September 15, 1997))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1997, American Library Association.)