Book Review: My Luck

Title: My Luck

Author: Melisa Todd

Date: 2020

Publisher: Bad Ash

Quote: "I didn't get nervous calling emergency services anymore. That might be a bad sign."

This fantasy series is set in the Ternion Universe, a world that's like ours down to having famous people with the same names in the same roles, except that many people now have magical powers and this has changed history a bit. Mostly it's changed contemporary reality. Education, employment, and "the draft" are now based on the kind of magic that becomes apparent when someone "emerges," within ten or fifteen years after puberty. 

Cori, the narrator, is pre-emergent. She is also presexual. People accept this, for the moment, because she's still a student. Cori doesn't think she's going to have magical powers, though according to the logic of the story all indications point to her having magical super-powers. For now, she's training as an emergency medical technician. We see her going to classes, taking tests, and actually working in hospitals and in accident scenes. Part of the plot is how Cori decides that EMT is her vocation.

Another part is how she deals with rejection by her parents. Cori has very weird luck--readers are being set up to guess that it's a sign of her magical powers. Even before enrolment in EMT training she's been drawn to scenes of accidents and emergencies. In the first scene in this book, she's reporting a death, only the thirteenth body she's mysteriously found. Accidents have a way of finding Cori, too, although most of them are the harmless funny kind; in one scene the ingredients from someone's shopping bag all blow up in her face in order, so that she's covered in all the makings of blueberry muffins. But then, what's been the burden of Cori's last ten years is the accident in which her twin brother died and she's still not sure exactly how. This has caused her parents to rent a separate apartment for her and stop speaking to her in the hallways. In the course of this story, Cori's baby brother wants to get to know her--and when their parents find out, they take out a restraining order and move to a different city.

So, genre: fantasy, with enough weird bits for Halloween reading, but strong undertones of coming-of-age literary fiction. No romance, though somewhere in the next (at the time this edition was published) twenty volumes that's likely to change. Some comedy, especially in the thumbnail biographies of Edison,Tesla, Churchill, Roosevelt, and other famous people as magic users. For a story about an EMT there's not a great deal of gore--people are bleeding or have ominously stopped bleeding, in a realistic, all-in-a-day's-work sort of way--but there's an element of horror: To draw on magical powers takes a sacrifice of some body tissue. People can intentionally cut off hair, fingernails,sometimes a finger, or they can activate their magic powers or fail to stop their magic powers self-activating and lose parts of their bodies. (And Cori doesn't know why her hair won't grow long and she's constantly scratching at dandruff that mysteriously disappears in the way sacrificed body parts do. That part is hard on the reader's suspension of disbelief.)

"Cori Catastrophe" is an appealing fictional character. Her asexuality, though probably temporary, makes her more interesting than most teen heroines. With inflation still dampening American spending habits, is that enough to motivate anyone to start a series that had twenty volumes in 2020? It just might be. If you like an active protagonist who doesn't want to be a writer and isn't silly about the young man she admits is attractive and a good friend, you might be willing to laugh your way through twenty more books about their crazy-mixed-up fantasy world.