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Lucky Break

Brooke Carter (Goodreads Author)

4.25 · Rating details · 8 ratings · 4 reviews

Seventeen-year-old Lucy Lucky Graves is devoted to her championship rugby team, but her dreams of a scholarship are destroyed when she breaks her leg during an important game. If it doesn't heal properly, Lucy could be benched for the rest of the year. Goodbye pro career, goodbye college, goodbye future. Without rugby, who is she? Now her anxiety is getting worse, and a pa ...more

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Paperback, 184 pages

Published August 28th 2018 by Orca Book Publishers

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Average rating 4.25 ·

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· 8 ratings · 4 reviews

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Aug 31, 2018 Melanie rated it liked it

Shelves: to-review, where, netgalley-read

Lucky Break was a fine read. I was surprised by how long it took for the storyline to get to the part where she breaks her leg, but it wasn't a boring read. I liked reading a book about rugby and the lists in the story were fun.

All in all, I enjoyed Lucky Break.

*Disclosure of Material Connection: I received one or more of the products or services mentioned above for free in the hope that I would mention/review it on my blog. I was not required to give a positive review, only my honest opinion - ...more

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Jul 20, 2018 Taylor (TaysBookishThoughts) rated it it was amazing

Lucy Graves is seventeen and captain of her rugby team. During a very important game, Lucy gets tackled and breaks her ankle. Breaking her ankle not only destroys her hopes of earning a scholarship but also brings up a past trauma. Now Lucy is full of even more anxiety and will have to overcome her past trauma in order to figure out what it means to be a real team player.

This book almost reads like a diary, but not really. Does that make sense, no? Okay. It's a very relatable book, both story an ...more

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Aug 31, 2018 Megan rated it really liked it

Shelves: august-2018, new-to-me-authors-2018, read-in-2018

Rugby isn't a game I'm very familiar with, but I enjoyed learning a bit more about it. The set back Lucy had by getting injured was heartbreaking, but I liked seeing her overcome it and try to get back in shape to play. All in all, a pretty good read. ...more

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Sep 02, 2018 Paul Coccia rated it it was amazing

Lucy “Lucky” Graves is the captain of her high school, all-girls, championship rugby team, a position she has worked hard for while maintaining excellent grades. If she keeps it up, she could land a scholarship which would allow her to afford university, something her single mother and Lucy would find hard to afford otherwise. Lucy is driven, focused, dedicated and determined to work hard and realize her ambitions, even when a cute redheaded boy from New Zealand (Andy) could distract her. Even w Lucy “Lucky” Graves is the captain of her high school, all-girls, championship rugby team, a position she has worked hard for while maintaining excellent grades. If she keeps it up, she could land a scholarship which would allow her to afford university, something her single mother and Lucy would find hard to afford otherwise. Lucy is driven, focused, dedicated and determined to work hard and realize her ambitions, even when a cute redheaded boy from New Zealand (Andy) could distract her. Even when Lucy breaks her leg and cannot play rugby, cannot lead her team to victory, and her OCD and PTSD threaten to overwhelm her. Lucy instead buckles down and decides to work harder but realizes that single-minded determination may not be enough to overcome all the obstacles in her way.

Lucky Break by Brooke Carter is part of the Orca Book Publishers’ sports collection, a division that helps build literacy skills, and Brooke Carter consistently demonstrates her skills and versatility as a writer, her respect for subject matter and readers, and her ability to create complex characters in complex situations without ever venturing into the territory of cliché. Lucky Break shows how much Carter can do as the novel shows a lot of balance and careful consideration. For example, Carter is able to talk about sports and body image, teamwork vs. the individual, drive, ambition, femininity and feminism mental disease and trauma without the novel ever being bogged down or having to solely be about one of those items. Lucy is like other main characters Carter has created in that she is a strong female force, observant, intelligent, funny, and intelligent. Lucy also has a great ability to be strong and powerful, especially physically as a rugby player, while maintaining a lot of a certain amount of youthful innocence (such as that concerning flirting and feelings as an adolescent) and vulnerability while never letting her character become hard or masculine. Lucy shows off the versatility of Carter in creating narrators, especially as Lucy wholly embodies some many contradictions and is perfectly well-rounded and human for Carter doing so.

There’s such a great feeling of GIRL POWER!!! and camaraderie while also dealing with the fact that the girls are competitive amongst each other within the team, with other female teams and against bigger, male-centric sports which do marginalize things like even a championship winning girls rugby team. The focus on a mostly female cast of characters and the ideas explored about the bonds between women, the ability to undercut or raise one another up, competitiveness, support and teamwork amongst females make this book incredibly relevant. At no point is feminine power in the novel equated with any type of compromise in terms of their gender. It’s both impressive and admirable for Carter to have achieved this.

I also found the relationship between Lucy and Andy to be quite sweet and charming and I was glad that with everything else in the novel, this interaction never became the main point of this story. Lucy and Andy are incredibly satisfying for me as a reader and I appreciated that Andy wasn’t a typical romantic lead male stock character, but someone quirkier, who loves math and knows nothing about sports, especially the rough-and-tumble sport of rugby, yet he never shies away from Lucy’s strengths (physical and otherwise) nor does he objectify her for them. Of course, their relationship is far from a smooth path.

I read Lucky Break in one sitting and it took less than 2 hours. At several points I told myself I’d get up to wash dishes or do something other task after “just one more chapter.” I am, admittedly, not someone who would likely read a sports story/book and know nothing about rugby. The pace of the plot, the characters and the concise explanations about rugby made Lucky Break a page turner that I whizzed through and would recommend, especially for reluctant readers more interested in playing a sport than read a book. ...more

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topics	posts	views	last activity
YA Buddy Readers'...: Lucky Break by Brooke Carter --> Starting August 30, 2018	9	6	Aug 31, 2018 10:37PM
Challenge Corner: Lucky Break, by Brooke Carter - Starting August 14th 2018	1	3	Aug 06, 2018 08:20AM