Three Times Lucky

Three Times Lucky by Sheila Turnage (audio book)

You never know what you are going to get. Three Times Lucky was another book I had checked out because it was getting Newbery attention. And I wasn’t excited for one reason – the word “lucky” in the title. I am utterly serious. In 2007, The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron won the Newbery Award and I downright despised it. That book might be the very one that began my love/hate relationship with the Newbery Committees. I look forward to award announcements with spastic excitement and lambast their decision with equal fervor. I am a librarian, what can I say – I want books that I can actually recommend to my young patrons. So when Three Times Lucky received a Newbery Honor, I was resigned to read it.

No, it is not Bomb, not even close, but it blows Ivan out of the water, easily, for me. I had just finished the choppy, disjointed, fictional docu/biography No Crystal Stair and I was in need of beautiful, flowing language. Three Times Lucky had it – readability – to give in abundance. From the first page I was hooked. I was in love. Here were kids, characters, free to roam and do as they please, including running the town café when the adults are in absentia. Pure fiction in my mind, but I don’t, in fact – mind.

Moses LoBeau and her best friend Dale Earnhardt Johnson III spend their summers fishing and serving up peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with Mountain Dew at Mo’s adoptive parents’ Café. But this summer, these “rising sixth graders” will be too busy to do either. This summer, the kids will become the “Desperado Detective Service” solving murder mysteries and locating lost felines.

There is more than one mystery to solve in this novel. Mo LoBeau is in search of her “Upstream Mother.” Mo was blown into Tupelo Landing, on the winds of a hurricane, lashed to a raft. Mo was discovered and rescued by a man known as the Colonel who would become her father. The Colonel is a mystery as well. He doesn’t remember the person he was before the accident that placed him on the scene of Mo’s blustery arrival. However, the book surrounds the mystery of the murder of Mr. Jesse, a man so crotchety that no one is sorry to see him go except the Sheriff who must find the killer.

If I had any complaint with this book, it was that there were two too many twists and turns towards the end. Confusion was added when a secondary character known by her surname, started being referred to by her first name. However, the list of quirky characters served up with a dose of southern slang, more than made up for such paltry complaints. I can picture this book being played out on Broadway. The characters are big enough to hold an audience. There is already a sequel in the works!