Hard Times in Hard Pan, CA: The Higher Power of Lucky

One thing you can say for The Higher Power of Lucky: it's not your average suburban sit-com novel, and Lucky is no Ramona Quimby, or Junie B. Jones, or Judy Moody. Hard Pan, California, is a rag-tag collection of shacks, trailers, and a water-tank-cum-house in the middle of the desert, and Lucky's role models are reformed drinkers, smokers, and overeaters who attend twelve-step meetings in the Found Object Wind Chime Museum and Visitor Center, where they weekly recite how they hit rock bottom and found their higher power.

And Lucky surely is in need of a higher power. Abandoned by her father, secreting a bronze crematory urn of her mother's remains, she is cared for by her father's first wife, Brigitte, summoned from France to be a temporary guardian. Lucky's greatest fear is that Brigitte will follow her heart back to France and leave her a ward of the state, separated from her dog, HMS Beagle, and far from the only home she has known. To protect herself, Lucky keeps her survival backpack ready to go, filled with her bug-collecting tools and a talisman from her best friend, aptly named Lincoln, a dedicated knot tyer whose gift is a symbol of Lucky's own longing:

Lucky cupped Lincoln's gift in her hand. The neat round buttonlike knot had no cord ends sticking out that might unwind, and you could never in a million years decipher how Lincoln had made it. You'd never find out how he had taken cords that were pretty useless, just lying around in someone's drawer, and looped and threaded them over and over in a special way until they ended up becoming a beautiful knot.

When Lucky finds Brigitte's suitcase and passport sitting out in her bedroom, she runs away into the desert in the hope that her disappearance will stop Brigitte from leaving. Her absence is complicated by a rising dust storm and the disappearance of Miles, a five-year-old who is equally parentally challenged. When the whole town of Hard Pan turns out to search for Lucky and Miles, Lucky is found scattering her mother's ashes into the wind.

When Lucky learns that Brigitte has indeed found a way to hold their life together, Susan Patron's novel reveals the ties by which their small community is interwoven in ways both unexpected and satisfying.