Lucky Strike

As she did in "The Metal Shredders," Nancy Zafris has created a cast of characters that you will simultaneously pity, love, loathe, respect and want to tuck under your wing and nurture. What fresh personalities she brings to life! The book is also filled with succinct insights that are painfully and, oddly, comically true: "People with short, fat fingers were usually the life of the party." Though the reader may find the book sluggish in spots, he/she will be rewarded at the end with insights into humanity that are both salty and sweet.

I savored every bit of this book. One of principal characters is Utah (a state that looks like its name with its canyons and mesas.) It is so otherworldly; it has attracted its own religion, colors, threats and natural resources. The other characters are as bright and colorful as Utah. When most of the country in the 1950's was busy establishing the suburbs, these characters are wandering the desert, trying to stake claims on uranium, adventure, and memories. Everyone glows with their own distinctions, interior doubts and dreams. The author fully realizes each character's traits and makes them so genuine that it makes you smile with recognition. There is real humor punctuated with lovely observations. Each page holds beautifully rendered language. I was glad to have found this book and want to spread the good news.

If you're looking for a book that transports you to another time and place, Lucky Strike is your gold mine. Far from being escapist, however, the story of a family's quest for hope and a brighter future through uranium is smart, ironic, and beautiful in the best way. With characters like Miss Dazzle and Jimmy Splendid, the book takes on the American west's boundless potential for adventure while at the same time reminding us of the simple and life-changing nature of true friendship and love. The beginning hooks, the middle satisfies and the ending astounds. Zafris forces us, through her compelling narrative style and flawless pacing, to understand the power of innocence and naivete in creating something as destructive as the atomic bomb. And it's laugh out loud funny, too.

Lucky Strike is one of the best books I have read this year. Nancy Zafris has a wit and depth that makes even the science of searching for uranium interesting and enlightening. But the heart of this book surpasses the laugh-out-loud moments. The heart lives within a mother's love, the innocence of childhood and the richness of a writer who understands both of these experiences enough to implant them within us for long after the reading is complete. I highly recommend this novel for anyone who believes in the joy of reading.

Lucky Strike is a wonderful novel about the search for uranium, friendship and love in Utah in the 1950's. In addition to beautiful widow Jean Waterman and her two kids Beth and Charlie, the Utah desert is thickly populated by other "dogstakers" looking to get rich, old miners (like Jimmy Splendid and Vincent Flaherty) with big personalities and even bigger grudges, and the Navajo men who work deep in the mines. There's even a motel proprietess named Miss Dazzle. The pretty innocence of the fifties (bathing beauties, True Romance, Doris Day) serves as stark contrast for the gritty realities of failed mines, Charlie's illness, Jean's lonliness, and the half-known dangers of uranium.