{"id":3575,"date":"2020-02-24T05:35:05","date_gmt":"2020-02-24T13:35:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=3575"},"modified":"2020-02-24T05:36:28","modified_gmt":"2020-02-24T13:36:28","slug":"lori-rader-day-the-lucky-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/lori-rader-day-the-lucky-one\/","title":{"rendered":"Lori Rader-Day: The Lucky One"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The Lucky One<\/em> follows the stories of Alice Fine, who as a child emerged unscathed from a kidnapping, and Merrily Cruz, who wants badly to find her missing father \u2013 or the closest approximation to a father that she\u2019s known.\u00a0 Rader-Day, in her typical fashion, fleshes out these women\u2019s stories with psychological background to each character, building and building them, until the two women practically become real.<\/p>\n

Alice\u2019s obsession with her kidnapping leads her to a website called The Doe Pages, where people are searching for the lost.\u00a0 She\u2019s drawn to it and she also thinks maybe she can find her kidnapper there.\u00a0 Her life is a little shut off \u2013 she\u2019s broken up with her fianc\u00e9e and she lives alone.\u00a0 She works in the office of the family construction company, with her father and uncle as benevolent bosses.\u00a0 The women on the Doe Pages, strangers, become acquaintances, then friends.<\/p>\n

Merrily, as the book opens, is celebrating her 30th<\/sup> birthday, and when some cops come to her office looking for her missing father (figure), she walks off the job.\u00a0 She wants answers and her mother isn\u2019t giving to her.\u00a0 Her mother is weirdly cagey about him. He from time to time texts Merrily, but never actually appears.\u00a0 Merrily thinks to herself after her birthday weekend that her mother has fed her nothing but \u201ccake and lies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course these two stories connect, but it\u2019s the tricky genius of the book that the ways they connect to one another only very slowly become clear.\u00a0 Both women are trying to find their places in the world, and to do that, they are also trying to find the places they came from \u2013 or who<\/em> they came from.\u00a0 The essential facts of their backgrounds are holding them up from moving ahead with their lives and making real connections to other people.\u00a0 To essentially growing up.\u00a0 They are kind of frozen in time.<\/p>\n

They mystery of Alice\u2019s kidnapping is tied to her own memories, which are sketchy as she was a child when she was taken, and her father\u2019s memories and the way he handled what happened to her.\u00a0 He now treats her with the utmost care, attempting to soften life\u2019s edges for her.\u00a0 As Alice and Merrily work away at their memories, they begin to find answers to their questions, not all of them welcome or happy.\u00a0 The threads of the book ultimately tie up in a resoundingly satisfying way.<\/p>\n

While Rader-Day could be classified as a noir writer as she looks at the underside of things, and finds that many of them are corrupted or not to be trusted, she ultimately ends her books with a more positive note.\u00a0 A thought that love or hope exists.\u00a0 She\u2019s an intelligent and thoughtful writer, and her respect for the people she brings to life on the page couldn\u2019t be clearer.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Lucky One follows the stories of Alice Fine, who as a child emerged unscathed from a kidnapping, and Merrily Cruz, who wants badly to find her missing father \u2013 or the closest approximation to a father that she\u2019s known.\u00a0 Rader-Day, in her typical fashion, fleshes out these women\u2019s stories with psychological background to each … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[320,318,14,319,291],"class_list":["post-3575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-identity-quest","tag-lori-rader-day","tag-psychological","tag-the-lucky-one","tag-william-morrow"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3575"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3575\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3578,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3575\/revisions\/3578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}