THE OTHER SIDE OF LUCK

A girl raised in opulence and a poor boy cross paths and, through one another’s eyes, find their own strengths.

Eleven-year-old Una is the firstborn child of the Magister Populi of Antiquitilla. Her mother died several years earlier, and her father has been absorbed in grieving, leaving her yearning for familial love. Meanwhile, Julien, who lives in poverty, is learning to identify every plant in the kingdom from his loving yet ailing Baba, who was Una’s mother’s gardener. Una experiences the world through her nose, while Julien doesn’t understand the sense of smell but has a special ability to hear plants. The sensory differences between the two children are interesting, and they work together to find the elusive silva flower—for which Una’s father has set a reward—before it can be located by dangerous marauders. Each child has deeply personal reasons for hoping to find it. The lyrical prose captures a fairy-tale setting, although occasional cartoonish hijinks and stylized, excessively formal dialogue from the children feel jarring. The flow of the book is in snapshots—short, focused chapters jumping from character to character, palace to bog. Frequent coincidences and the tidy ending detract from the hard-fought growth Una and Julien achieve through their own efforts. Physical descriptions of characters are few, although Una and her family are cued as Black, and several references to natural Black hair feel othering.

A fascinating premise set in a unique sensory world that almost delivers.