Lucky for Good (review)

The Hard Pan Café, nestled in the crook of three mismatched welded trailers in the Mojave Desert, is thriving, providing some financial stability for Lucky Trimble and her adoptive mother, Brigitte, when up pulls a county truck with Stu Burping to inform them that Regulation 1849 prohibits a commercial kitchen in a residence. Readers who've met the resourceful residents of Hard Pan in Patron's two previous works (The Higher Power of Lucky and Lucky Breaks, BCCB 1/07 and 5/09) know they'll rally to the cause; an abandoned cabin is hauled down from the mine, and although the brakeless tractor hauling it nearly wipes out several citizens, a burro, and a cat, the cafe will soon be back up and running. But not all problems are so expeditiously managed. The mother of Lucky's young friend Miles has just been released from jail, and she arrives full of the Lord and promptly upends all of her precocious son's belief in evolution. A fistfight with Stu Burping's pugnacious nephew lands Lucky an assignment to research her family tree, an undertaking that forces her to confront her ambivalent feelings toward her absentee father. Her good friend Paloma visits frequently and still collapses with her in laughing jags, and her dearest friend, Lincoln, has surprised her with a sweet, but quite unbrotherly, kiss, a development that calls for some emotional processing. This concluding volume of the Hard Pan trilogy ends in a good place, with Lucky poised to enter junior high a little more thoughtful, a little less impulsive, and confident that her friends, neighbors, and beloved Brigitte are every bit as much a family as anyone gets. Readers who have been privileged to grow alongside Lucky during the trilogy's cycle are probably beginning to suspect that much of life, like Hard Pan itself, is held together with spit and a prayer, but in a supportive community, that's probably good enough.