In the late 60s, three teenagers from around the globe are making their way in the world: Enrique Florit, from Cuba, living in southern California with his flamboyant magician father; Marta Claros, getting by in the slums of San Salvador; Leila Rezvani, a well-to-do surgeon’s daughter in Tehran. We follow them through the years, surviving war, disillusionment, and love, as their lives and paths intersect. With its cast of vividly drawn characters, its graceful movement though time, and psychological shifts between childhood and adulthood, A Handbook to Luck is a beautiful, elegiac, and deeply emotional novel.
Reviews
“García writes with humor, tenderness and an intuitive sense of how ordinary people weather fortune’s turns. If you long for a ‘handbook’ that reveals how ordinary people become extraordinary, you are in luck.”
—Daily News
“Pitch-perfect… García is still drawn to describe the richness and variety of the immigrant experience… [But] she also fixes her attention on the fundamentally human desire to make sense of the world, to impose order on the chaos of nature and to rationalize one’s mysterious place within it.”
—Chicago Tribune
“A magically lyrical meditation on life and human dreams… García [is] a poet of imagery and metaphor.”
—Elle