This is one of the best literary novels I’ve read in recent memory. I’ve been too mentally fatigued to enjoy much but genre fiction lately. Lucky Third Girl is both an easy and satisfying read. It tells the story of three generations of African-American women: a woman scarred by a 1921 race riot in Tulsa, her daughter who went to Hollywood to be a movie star and instead became a Playboy bunny and blaxploitation bit player in the 1970s, and then her daughter, who aspire to be a filmmaker in present day New York.
Most of the book is about the middle generation, Angie Edwards, a bisexual lover of life. All of the women are rich characters, to whom you can relate. The story is told in multiple voices, but you don’t mind, because as I said, you can relate to them all. I don’t always like that sort of thing, and at one point I started to be concerned about the anti-linear storytelling. It ended up not bothering me, perhaps because I love the literary tradition that assumes you can’t know a woman without knowing her female ancestors.
Cats: as good as a book can be and not have cats