The Good Luck Girls
The Good Luck Girls series, Book 1
Charlotte Nicole Davis
Tor Teen
Fiction, YA Fantasy/Western
**+ (Bad/Okay)
DESCRIPTION: When the Empire that conquered Arketta fell, it was supposed to be the dawn of a new era of equality and opportunity. Instead, it was more of the same oppression and prejudice, especially for the dustbloods: descendants of criminals and indentured servants sent by the empire to subdue the native cultures and tame the new land, only to end up little more than property to the fairblood aristocracy and, more recently, the fairblood landowners. Dustbloods are told to be grateful for the meager opportunities to repay their debts - after all, everyone knows it's just their nature to be lazy criminals, and fairbloods are doing them a favor teaching them the value of hard work. The only way out is to strike it rich - essentially impossible for a dustblood - or escape Arketta's borders - almost as impossible. But that doesn't stop the desperate from trying...
Aster and Clementine were sold by their dustblood parents when they were young. Agents for the "welcome houses" promised the girls would have shelter and fine clothes and food every night, in exchange for providing certain services to paying customers. As with most fairblood promises, it's a lie; the "good luck" girls are marked with indelible "favor" tattoos of cursed ink that burn white-hot if concealed, sent to the doctor for cutting to prevent pregnancy, and worked mercilessly as servants until their sixteenth birthday when they start their real work in the private rooms... work helped by addictive sweet thistle that keeps them docile and eventually rots their minds away. Aster "graduated" a year ago, and will do anything to keep her sister from becoming another plaything for the brags, the clients who frequent the welcome houses and have been known to kill girls as casually as drowning kittens... but there's nothing she can do, not when their lack of shadows mark them as dustbloods and their favors forever mark them as runaways. But Clementine's first night with a brag ends in murder - self defense, as the man was choking her to death, but the fairblood law won't see it that way. Now, the girls have no choice but to flee, following a slender thread of hope found in old tales of "Lady Ghost", who is said to be able to strip away favor marks and help good luck girls find freedom. With three companions - Clementine's friends Tansy and Mallow and the unlikely ally Violet, a rare fairblood good luck girl - Aster and Clementine make a desperate bid for freedom... but the law isn't the only danger awaiting them, in a rough country where wild beasts and vengeful spirits are as deadly as any lawman's bullet.
REVIEW: Once again, I wanted to like this book. It starts with a decent, if dark, premise and world, adding a strong Western frontier spice with a twist of ghostly menace. The girls have distinctive personalities, and if they aren't always deep, they do end up cohesing into an okay ensemble for the adventure. There's also a fair bit of action, so the tale doesn't drag too often (even if it does sometimes repeat itself). But at some point, little issues start accumulating into big irritants. The dustblood/fairblood dynamic is clearly meant as a stand-in for cultural and racial prejudices that see some people utterly dehumanized (while the dominant culture/race demands gratitude for not treating them even worse), but for some reason I started feeling like it was being a little too obvious about the substitution, the hammered-home disparities between dustbloods and fairbloods turning them both into something approaching caricatures rather than characters. Likewise, most every man in the book (with one notable exception) is a misogynistic creep/borderline (or actual) rapist who cannot understand why the heroines don't simply accept and appreciate their single role in Arkettan society. This, too, soon ventures past a harrowing portrayal of how women are treated in a misogynistic society and becomes almost cartoonish in its extremity and repetition (not at all helped by how the narrator of this audiobook spoke the male lines with a sleazy, slinky, almost cackling drawl). There's also a noted habit of every character in the book to pick terrible, terrible times and places for long, heartfelt conversations... and a habit of the author repeating failures to drive home just how terrible the situation is, how horribly the girls are being treated, how hopeless and cruel and infuriatingly unfair the society they live in is, and so forth.
The parts that ultimately sank it below a flat Okay rating, though, come toward the climax, when the torture and objectification is drug out far, far too long, banging the same plot notes again and again and yet again like a sledgehammer dropped on a keyboard, to make subsequent events remotely plausible; I'm avoiding details because of spoilers, but at some point it completely killed my lingering suspension of disbelief stone-cold dead, leaving me to trail along behind the story to the conclusion without the slightest bit of concern or engagement in what was happening to whom. Killing my suspension of disbelief - one the main driving factors behind why I read in the first place - is one of the major sins in my list of reading commandments.
While there are some nice and interesting elements here, and several places where the story does come together to work decently, I just could not get past that sin, which taints everything that came before.
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