Review Detail

When we first meet Carrie, the protagonist of Lucky T, she is a self-absorbed, selfish and very superstitious girl. Her luckiest possession is a t-shirt that her dad (now absentee and divorced from her mother) gave her. When her mother accidentally gives the shirt away to a charity group, Carrie is determined to get it back, especially after her popular & cute boyfriend breaks up with her and she and her best friend are on the outs.

Most people would give up when they discover that the shirt is on a plane to India, but not Carrie. She convinces her mother to let her travel to India with her mom's best friend (Celia) and daughter (Doreen, or Dor-mean, as Carrie likes to call her). To show just how out of touch Carrie is with the world around her, the first thing she says once off the plane is about how she'd love a cheeseburger. That doesn't go over very well with the natives and it gets worse from there as she manages to ruin a day's work on her first day with Help India (they build houses for people, similar to Habitat for Humanity).

As luck would have it, Carrie meets up with Dee, a gorgeous college student who happens to volunteer at a local orphanage. Carrie switches to volunteering there and the reader finally begins to see some worth in our heroine as she bonds with the kids. Carrie begins to wake up to what the real world is like and that other people have it much harder than she can even imagine.

Carrie and Dee's romance goes up and down as Dee continually discovers facets of Carrie's personality (some good, some bad). The big question when Carrie finally finds the t-shirt against all odds, does she 'steal' it off the back of a child living in a woman's shelter or does she become a bigger person?

By the end of the book, I liked Carrie. That was a hard sell for me, because she is such a snot in the beginning, even shutting out her best friend and mother for no good reason. She shows real growth through the course of the novel. I recommend this book to readers aged 12 and up, primarily girls, though the basketball talk may pull some boys in.