Lucky

by Alice Sebold

Madeline Miller (Introduction)

In Lucky, a memoir hailed for its searing candour and wit, Alice Sebold reveals how her life was utterly transformed when, as an eighteen-year-old college freshman, she was brutally raped and beaten in a park near campus.

What propels this chronicle of her recovery is Sebold's indomitable spirit – as she struggles for understanding (‘After telling the hard facts to anyone, from lover to friend, I have changed in their eyes’); as her dazed family and friends sometimes bungle their efforts to provide comfort and support; and as, ultimately, she triumphs, managing through grit and coincidence to help secure her attacker's arrest and conviction.

In a narrative by turns disturbing, thrilling, and inspiring, Alice Sebold illuminates the experience of trauma victims even as she imparts wisdom profoundly hard-won: ‘You save yourself or you remain unsaved.’

• ISBN10: 033041836X
• ISBN13: 9780330418362
• Publish Date: 6 June 2003 (first published 19 February 2000)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 26 January 2021
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Imprint: Picador
• Edition: Reprints
• Format: Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
• Pages: 256
• Language: English

Reviews

[Whitney @ First Impressions Reviews]

First Sentence

In the tunnel where I was raped, a tunnel that was once an underground entry to an amphitheatre, a place where actors burst forth from underneath the seats of a crowd, a girl had been murdered and dismembered.

 

Review

Alice Sebold is a powerful writer.  Be it fiction or memoir she has a way of drawing you in with words.  Like The Lovely Bones, Lucky is difficult to read a times.  This memoir is rawer than fiction.  It makes your skin crawl with hurt and revulsion to what is happening.

It is strange to say I enjoyed reading a novel about rape but I did. Alice Sebold makes you feel a roller coaster of emotions and I found it hard to put Lucky down.

This review was originally posted on First Impressions Reviews