The Good Luck Girls
The Good Luck Girls series, Book 1
Charlotte Nicole Davis
Tor Teen
Fiction, YA Fantasy/Western
Themes: Cross-Genre, Diversity, Frontier Tales, Ghosts, Girl Power
**+
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.