switterbug (Betsey)'s Reviews > Lucky Boy

If any readers are skeptical that vibrant, tingling, page-turning storytelling can also be literary, I’m convinced that LUCKY BOY could change your mind. Saturated with ethical questions about maternal love, privilege, boundaries, and the immigrant experience, the story tells itself without any authorial interference. Hard questions have no soft answers, and the reader, while adventuring through morally complex lines and barriers, will surely be exhilarated and full of empathy for all the primary characters.

There are no easy outcomes to knotty disputes of immigration and the undocumented worker, as well as the foster care system and questions of class and standing. When a child is involved, the heart demands authority over statutes that are buried under benevolence. What we have is a tale bursting with humanity that traverses the invisible borders of the law, morality, and mercy that both connect and divide us from each other. There are borders and boundaries, and then there are immigrants and the law. But, when it comes to maternal love, that love IS the law, and there are no boundaries in the heart that can be imposed by the courts.

Privileged Indian American Berkeley couple Kavya and Rishi Reddy are in their mid-thirties and childless. Kavya, especially, is envious of couples with children, pregnant women, and those that effortlessly conceive. They begin a process of obtaining a child with a desperation that is exclusively understood by the barren and single-minded.

Solimar “Soli” Castro Valdez is a nineteen-year-old from a poverty-stricken village near Oaxaca. Her anguish resides in the unending hope of a better future somewhere else—and that somewhere else is America. What she entails to cross the border is both courageous and harrowing, but not without a pause in terror to find love.

All three of these main characters are motivated by desperation and moved by certainty—the surety of their hearts that sometimes defies the law and ethics. What they would do for a child they love is limitless, unquantifiable, and borne on their own determination of their desire, their sense of right that supersedes external and murky morality defined by others.

You can read the blurb on the book for content of plot, although I would suggest coming into it cold with no preconceived notions or plot-spoilers. Therefore, I am withholding from too much notation of the plot. Although it is close to 450 pages, I read this unputdownble book at a rapid pace, not wanting to tear myself away. What a fine balance between plot and theme, events and reflection.

And Rishi’s job, as an air quality engineer, provides witty and scintillating extended metaphors. Attempting to create a room of “pure” air for his company (and to impress his boss, now married to Kavya’s childhood friend, who she always envied) is almost absurd. His goal is to create an invisibly bordered room of non-toxic, flawlessly healthy and breathable air. It blends impeccably with the theme of manifest borders and systematic laws that are supposed to be created for the good of its citizens, but also can run roughshod over families and the nature of love and bonds.

“Air quality data was clear and quantifiable. It could be summoned and charted. Children and wives could not. Acceptance couldn’t be graphed. Nor could love.”


In the meantime, Soli is attempting to navigate life as an “illegal.” It isn’t just the border of Mexico and America, but also what she will be willing to do to get what she wants. She is at a disadvantage being poor in a rich country, but now she has a reason to fight and win under any circumstances. She’s a scrappy girl with resources, despite her lack of money, education, and fluency of English. You root for her determination and empathize with her, as well as Kavya and Rishi, whose privilege obscures an underlying despair. Eventually, these characters will be fighting the same fight, each certain of their rightness.

Invisible and indivisible, cleaving and cleaving (the same words with opposite meanings)—the narrative will pull you on both sides of an argument, while pushing you to new frontiers of emotion while you witness human truths that parallel ideology and undermine the law.