With a Little Luck (Fortuna Beach #2)
Marissa Meyer
Feiwel & Friends
Published February 13, 2024
Amazon | Bookshop | Goodreads
About With a Little Luck
After being magically gifted with incredible luck, a boy discovers this gift just may be a curse when it comes to love, in this YA novel by #1 New York Times -bestselling author Marissa Meyer.
Jude is determined to fly under the radar. He just wants to draw his comics, host regular D&D night with his friends, work at his parents’ vinyl record store, and escape high school as unscathed as possible. That is, until the night he comes across a mysterious twenty-sided dice and finds himself inexplicably gifted with a bout of supernatural good luck.
Suddenly, everything Jude has ever wanted is within reach. His first art submission is accepted to his favorite fanzine. He helps his friend’s song become a finalist in a songwriting competition. And he’s the 100th caller to a local radio contest, winning him a pair of coveted concert tickets, which he uses to ask out the popular girl he’s been crushing on since elementary school. For a few blissful weeks, he feels invincible.
But when he loses the magic dice at a local music festival, his luck takes a turn for the worse. He struggles to reclaim his good fortune while fighting off long-buried feelings for his best friend―who is definitely not the girl he’s supposed to be in love with. Can Jude risk stepping into the spotlight long enough to win the true girl of his dreams? Or is he doomed to be unlucky in love forever?
My Review
It’s pretty rare to read a romance that’s written entirely from the boy’s point-of-view, and I thought it was a cool choice to make with this book. I’ve read several books featuring characters playing Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), but it’s also less common for the Dungeon Master to be the point-of-view character, so that was another fun element of this book.
Another great, unexpected thing that WITH A LITTLE LUCK has is graphic novel panels showing the way the D&D campaign and its backstory play out. I thought that was a really clever way of differentiating the game from the real-world scenes, and it made them dynamic and entertaining while also drawing us deeper into Jude’s character since he was supposed to have drawn the panels.
As a D&D player (and occasional DM), I appreciated the way the panels also gave us a lot of information about the campaign without weighing the scene down or distracting us from the plot of the overall story. The panels kept it separate but still allowed for it to be the focus in the right places.
I also felt like this story had a good mix of predictable and unpredictable moments. I mean, it’s a romance, right? So we know there will be some romantic moments, and there are. Some of them I totally saw coming, and others were much more unexpected. I think the balance of those kept the story feeling fresh and fun.
Altogether, this was a very cute, upbeat romance. I definitely think fans of the first book in the series will appreciate this one, and so will fans of Jenna Evans Welch and Kasie West.
Content Notes
Recommended for Ages 12 up.
Representation
Ari, Jude’s best friend is Latina. One minor character is nonbinary.
Profanity/Crude Language Content
Strong profanity used very infrequently.
Romance/Sexual Content
Kissing between boy and girl.
Spiritual Content
Jude finds a twenty-sided dice that seems to make him incredibly lucky.
Violent Content
None.
Drug Content
None.
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