I have been anticipating Linda Williams Jackson’s newest book, The Lucky Ones, for some time. Thankfully, Lemuria Book Store had it in anticipation of her appearance at the Mississippi Book Festival when we made a recent trip to Jackson. I picked it up for a ten-year-old grandson’s birthday, knowing he would not care that I had pre-read his copy!
I loved and blogged about her two previous books Midnight Without a Moon and its sequel, A Sky Full of Stars. They are set in the Mississippi Delta in 1955 during the Civil Rights Movement. In The Lucky Ones, Linda stays in the Delta but moves forward to 1967 with a different protagonist. Ellis Earl Brown knows he wants to grow up to be a teacher or lawyer or both. The reader can see the impossibility in his dream with his mother working as a maid to bring in enough money to feed him, his eight siblings and his niece Vera. The probability that he will have to quit school and help support the family looms in the background.
Still, there is his teacher Mr. Foster giving lessons about other famous people like Mr. Thurgood Marshall and Miss Marian Wright who are models for him. Then Mr. Foster gives him a book that he reads with his siblings, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, about a boy with an even greater degree of poverty than his own. Mr. Foster’s interest in Ellis Earl brings him to Robert Kennedy’s southern poverty tour where he is accompanied by Miss Marian Wright. An interesting twist to this trip gives the possibility that happy endings may not belong just to story books.
As she has done before, Linda Williams Jackson takes her own experiences of growing up in the Delta to weave a realistic and historically accurate middle grade novel that will appeal to children (and adult readers like me) who love to see heroes like Charlie Bucket and Ellis Earl Brown attain their goals.