GOOD LUCK AND OTHER LIES

When six teens team up to try and win the lottery, their lives unexpectedly become more complicated than they imagined.

Sixteen-year-old Cassie Carsten’s life on Australia’s Sunshine Coast is quickly unraveling. She’s overshadowed by her five younger half siblings, and now, because of housing issues, her father plans to send her to live in Sydney with the mum she barely knows. Desperate to find a solution that will allow her to stay, Cassie is excited to overhear some classmates—Kye Takeo, Luke Conrad, Meg Narcisse, Alex Jakov, and Harriet Kurt—plotting a way to win the lottery. She joins them, they win $50,000,000—and their lives are turned upside down. After tragedy strikes one of the team members, and their relationships grow strained, Cassie starts to wonder whether winning the lottery was truly a stroke of luck. The moralizing feels heavy-handed throughout, and readers may be surprised and left dissatisfied and wanting more complexity when everything is neatly wrapped up at the end of the story. The fast-moving plot also covers a lot of ground without delving deeper into the topics it raises, including money troubles, artificial intelligence, sextortion, parentification, child abandonment, and toxic teen relationships. Fortunately, the characters come across as realistic and relatable, as do most of their problems. Most characters are cued white, Luke has brown skin, and Kye is originally from Japan.

An accessible read that disappointingly lacks depth.