Summary
The heart of the novel The Higher Power of Lucky is its main character, Lucky Trimble, who manages to portray how ten-year-olds speak, reason, and feel in a timeless fashion. The way Lucky thinks about her life and, especially, the way she makes sense of her strange family and living situation are both heartbreaking and heartwarming. She finds meaning in pain, order in chaos, and humor in the midst of a dust storm.
At least as impressive, though, is how Lucky fits into the town of Hard Pan, California. With a population of only 43, it is a place where every detail matters, and Lucky, who idolizes Charles Darwin, studies it like the natural scientist she wants to be. The difference is that, though Lucky observes her environment with an acuity similar to Darwin’s, she is interwoven with her environment. Each of her perceptive observations is also an adaptation that carries emotional and spiritual implications.
On a simpler level, The Higher Power of Lucky is downright fun. Lucky’s eye for detail, her intense ambitions, her storytelling abilities, and her interactions with friends such as Lincoln the knot-obsessed are pure pleasure.
Extended Summary
The Higher Power of Lucky begins with Lucky Trimble crouching next to a hole in the wall of Hard Pan’s Found Object Wind Chime Museum and Visitor Center, listening to a twelve-step meeting and stories about how people hit bottom and found their “Higher Powers.” Lucky is interested in finding her Higher Power.
Lucky goes home to the trailer where she lives with Brigitte, her guardian since her mother was accidentally killed. Brigitte had come from France at Lucky’s father’s request.
Lucky’s friend Lincoln calls to borrow a black permanent marker, and he asks Lucky to meet him at a traffic sign their friend Miles had asked about. Lucky does. The sign says “Slow Children at Play” until Lincoln adds a colon so that it now reads “Slow: Children at Play,” making the sign’s intended meaning more clear, an act Lucky labels “presidential.”
A few days later, Lucky is at home killing bugs for her insect collection when her five-year-old friend Miles comes over for some cookies and a story. Miles wants Lucky to read him his favorite book, Are You My Mother?, but Lucky counters with a story about the “Olden Days of Hard Pan” starring Chesterfield the Burro. Miles wants more stories, but Lucky says no.
Just then, Brigitte gets home, so Miles gets her to tell the story of how she came to Hard Pan. As Brigitte unpacks her government surplus supplies, she tells her story. She and Lucky’s father had been married a long time ago. When Lucky’s mother was killed, Lucky’s father called Brigitte in France and asked her to come help. She flew to Los Angeles airport and then drove through the city until she reached the desert and, eventually, Hard Pan. Brigitte had planned to stay only a short time, just until a foster family could be found for Lucky, but it took a long time, and to help with the paperwork she became Lucky’s legal guardian.
After Miles leaves, Brigitte goes to get their mail from their post office box. Lucky prepares for her future as a famous scientist by writing a museum exhibit on the tarantula hawk wasp. After Brigitte gets home, she goes to finish the laundry that Lucky was supposed to have done. However, she found a snake has gotten into the dryer. Brigitte is terrified of snakes, so she seals the dryer closed with duct tape. Lucky approaches the problem like a scientist, banging on the...
(This entire section contains 1370 words.)
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dryer until the snake goes back out through the vent and into the desert.
Lucky leaves Brigitte listening to sad French songs and goes to visit Short Sammy in his water tank house. Sammy is trying to find a way to make the government surplus food tasty. Lincoln is there, and the three of them talk about Brigitte and the differences between Hard Pan and France. Short Sammy suggests that Brigitte needs a job.
On Sunday, Lucky calls Lincoln to talk about the urn containing her mother’s ashes. Lucky had been given the urn two years ago, just after Brigitte arrived, and was supposed to sprinkle the ashes on the ground at the memorial service. However, she had not been able to do it. Lincoln tells Lucky that the man who had brought the ashes had been her father. Lucky had not known this and asks why. Lincoln has no answer, but he gives her a beautiful knot he had woven.
Later that day, Lucky listens in on the twelve-step meeting for smokers, hoping to learn how they found their Higher Powers. She hears the Captain’s story, then Mrs. Prender’s (Miles’s grandmother). As Mrs. Prender speaks, she mentions that her daughter (Miles’s mother) was in jail for dealing drugs.
That night, when Lucky is washing the dinner dishes, she bends Brigitte’s parsley grinder. Brigitte takes it over to Dot’s to fix it. While she was gone, Lucky searches her suitcase, where she finds Brigitte’s passport. This makes Lucky think Brigitte is going to leave her, crashing her to “rock bottom.” She decides to run away. When Brigitte returns, they squabble. Brigitte goes to bed, leaving her “lesson” unfinished. Lucky examines this lesson and discovers that it is a correspondence course in restaurant management from a culinary school in Paris. This further convinces her that Brigitte is going to leave.
On Monday morning when she is on the school bus, Lucky gets her first sign from the universe that running away is the right decision: she and Lincoln could share a joke by looking at one another, without even speaking. Later, Lucky received two more signs. The second was when one of her teachers explained how Darwin reasoned that animals survived by adapting to their environment, using the white fur of the polar bear as an example. Since Lucky was the same sandy brown color all over, she took this as a sign that this was so she could blend into the desert landscape when she ran away. Lucky’s third sign was that she and other kids who lived a long way from school were sent home early because there was a dust storm forecast. This gave her more time to run away, and the dust storm would make it easier to blend in.
When Lucky gets off the bus, her dog HMS Beagle is waiting for her. Lucky checks her survival kit again, packs some food for the trip, and adds the urn containing her mother’s ashes and Brigitte’s parsley grinder. Just as Lucky is about to leave, Miles shows up. Lucky is mean to him, telling him that his mother is in jail. Miles runs into the dust storm crying. Lucky decided to wear Brigitte’s fancy red silk dress when she runs away. Miles’s grandmother calls to see if Lucky had seen Miles. Lucky lies, saying “no.” She hangs up, but right away Lincoln calls, letting her know that everyone in Hard Pan is looking for Miles.
Lucky and HMS Beagle run away. Lucky is leading them to the abandoned mines when suddenly HMS Beagle runs off to smell a pile in the sand. Lucky cannot get the dog to come with her, so she forces her way through the dust storm. She is almost lost when she finds the dugouts leading into small caves. Once she is sheltered and can put down her pack, she goes back to look for HMS Beagle. The dog is still beside that pile in the sand, which turns out to be Miles.
Miles is crying because he was lost and had a large cactus burr stuck in his foot. Lucky has to carry him to the dugout for shelter. She tries to get the burr out but fails until she remembers she’s carrying Brigitte’s parsley grinder, which is the perfect shape for popping the burr out. She then makes them a dinner of hard cooked eggs and baked beans, improvising a can opener to do so.
Lucky is feeling pretty grown up and satisfied about her running away until a bug crawls in her ear, something she had long had a phobia about. Lucky has Miles get the mineral oil from her survival kit and pour it in her ear to drown the bug. To keep them both calm, Lucky reads Are You My Mother? to him, and they talk about why his mother was in jail and what it meant until Lincoln shows up at the dugout, explaining that Miles’s grandmother knew they would probably be there.
The rest of the town follows Lincoln. When they arrive, Lucky declares the gathering of everyone in town her mother’s memorial service. She scatters her mother’s ashes, and Short Sammy leads the town in singing “Amazing Grace.”
That night, when she is back home with Brigitte, Lucky learns that the passport and all the other paperwork are out so Brigitte can adopt Lucky, and that the restaurant management course was so she could open a restaurant in Hard Pan. The last chapter is set at an unidentified time later, when Brigitte has successfully opened Brigitte’s Hard Pan Café.
