Luck o' the Irish! Fancy Nancy: Just My Luck by Jane O'Connor

FOR SHOW-AND-SHARING, CLARA HAS A FOUR-LEAF CLOVER.  SHE PASSES IT AROUND.

AT RECESS, I DECIDED TO FIND MY OWN FOUR-LEAF CLOVER.  

LIONEL HELPED.

Nancy's search is not so lucky, but she does find Robert's lost library card. That's lucky for him.

But Grace, the class sourpuss, notices Nancy heading back inside the school:

"YOU STEPPED ON A CRACK!"

Grace is all too happy to tell Nancy what terribly bad luck follows such a misstep and warn her about all the other harbingers of ill fortune to watch out for--walking under ladders, opening an umbrella indoors, having a black cat cross her path, and on and on. Maybe it's just her Irish, but suddenly Nancy Clancy is in the clutches of superstition, anxious about all the bad omens she's been apparently ignoring all her life.

At home Nancy checks her mirror for cracks, and almost spills salt when Jojo bumps her arm at dinner. At school the next day she eats 14 potato chips, even though she only wanted 13, just to avoid that unlucky number, and when she's called on to give the sum of 6 + 7, she can't bring herself to say the right answer--because it's unlucky.

Suddenly Nancy feels like she has a black cloud of bad fortune floating over her head!

In Jane O'Connor's brand-new I-Can-Read Fancy Nancy story, Fancy Nancy: Just My Luck! (I Can Read Book 1) (Harper, 2014), it's her good luck that her empathetic teacher Ms. Glass guesses her problem with saying "thirteen"  and  in a quiet moment, assuages her worries over these superstitions. A black cat is just a lost kitty, but a penny she finds on the sidewalk? Well, if she is lucky enough to find 99 more, she'll have a dollar! That's not so bad!  Robin Preiss Glasser  provides the cover art, and illustrator Ted Enik does the page illustrations for this Level 1 beginning reader, just in time for seasonal (St. Patrick's Day and April Fools' Day) reading.