Book Review: My Luck

My Luck, by Mel Todd. I’m going to have to give credit where credit is due and give it three out of five stars, because it is a very engaging and reasonably well-written alternate history urban fantasy. But it is first and foremost a very well-written dystopia, and I’d advise you only go looking for it if you want something that starts out enjoyable if puzzling on first read… then you sit back and think the worldbuilding over, and get very angry.

So we have a main character nicknamed Cori Catastrophe because things constantly go spectacularly and bizarrely wrong around her. On top of that her brother died mysteriously, her parents effectively abandoned her (moving her into a separate apartment and just providing some money every month to live on to a fourteen-year-old is abandonment and horrible neglect, by any legal definitions, never mind the whole “never come near your new little brother who doesn’t even know he has a sister”), and she keeps finding very weird dead bodies. To the point every emergency service in town knows exactly who she is and that they’d better send Homicide if she says someone’s dead. On top of that, her job prospects are Slim, son of None, because she has no money and no magic. But she’s worked her way through school and into an EMT program, because she’s determined to get herself to a place where she’s employed, okay, and never dependent on her parents for anything else ever again.

Good. Excellent. I admire the determination, work ethic, and guts to play a lousy hand well, which is pretty much why I got the book. But after you get past the spot the sample ends… well, people’s actions and choices get progressively weirder and “waaaaait a minute, this makes no sense.”

One of the reviewers on Amazon said the main character was dense. I would not actually say so – or more accurately, I would say she’s no more dense than every other adult in contact with her. From the moment her twin brother dies… seriously, that is a hideous, sudden, unexplained death in a world where magic, spontaneous and deadly magical eruptions, and Murphy’s Luck curses are known to exist. And no one seems to have checked the one person holding the body when EMS got there? Then, or in all the years later when catastrophe after catastrophe follows in her wake like ducklings after breadcrumbs? And she manifests multiple symptoms that, if you pay attention, mean she may be constantly fueling magic. Yet in the whole book we get one person constantly muttering to her that she ought to get checked – but he’s a mage that always speaks in Cryptic, and apparently never discussed this potential life-threatening already-may-have-killed-multiple-people uncontrolled problem with anyone.

As someone once put it, if your entire plot could be unraveled by someone putting a Post-It on a refrigerator door, you have a Problem.

Leaving aside the magic, the other characters in the book seem to have been constrained by the plot to act in a manner that left the main character isolated and alone for all these years. As the book goes on, we have one character after another admit that what Cori’s parents did was Horribly Wrong, but they didn’t want to step in because “you would have ended up in foster care and that would be worse, and you seemed to be handling it.”

…There are a heck of a lot of things said characters could have done besides getting social workers involved. They could have spoken to her parents. They could have showed up at Cori’s door themselves and taken her out grocery shopping. Offered an outing to a thrift store, “to see if there’s any neat treasures in our sizes”. Sent in the local church ladies to “help with spring cleaning”. Asked if she wanted to go over the day’s homework, for goodness’ sake. If the community thinks her parents’ treatment is wrong, the community ought to do something.

But then, overall, this is a sick society. It doesn’t look sick. It looks fairly functional, with most people doing reasonably fine. And yet.

If you’re a mage with anything beyond a little power – and you have no choice in becoming a mage, it’s something that happens to you, has been happening to people since the end of the U.S. Civil War – you are tattooed. On the face, where everyone can see it forever. Then required to go to college. And then required to serve the government in whatever way they see fit, for four to ten years depending on how powerful you are. Involuntary draft. No way around it. Trying to avoid it can and has gotten people hunted down and killed.

And this is supposed to be the United States of America.

What’s more, this tattoo-and-draft takes place all over the world – the UN makes the rules about that. Along with hunting down mages who slip through the cracks.

…Yeah, the idea of the UN having any say over how the U.S. treats its own people makes me sputter in disbelief, too. I’m going to blame Marvel movies here; I think a lot of people have completely missed how the UN actually works. For now let’s just hit the UN Security Council, who’d be the only part of the body who could even threaten to try something this stupid. It consists of fifteen members; ten elected on a regional basis who serve for two years at a time, and five permanent members, being the U.S., Russia, China, France, and the U.K. Permanent members can block any Security Council resolution with just one veto.

Forget human rights violations. Does anyone – anyone with a functioning brain – think the leadership of any of these countries would want their mages permanently identifiable? On the battlefield, in espionage, as targets for literal corporate headhunting?

Right.

Now back to those human rights violations. Tattooed for identification. Does this remind you of anything? Hmm?

And not everyone should be in college. Seriously. It takes a certain mindset, skill base, and being a bit cracked in the head, sometimes. If you really want to train people for their own safety you’d be better off doing it as part of a trade school or locally-offered instruction.

Except I checked a few samples ahead in the series (trying to see if things got better, nope) and the laws around the draft in book 5 once they’ve got you are… well. They make me ill. In short, the instructors decide if you pass or fail, and if you threaten them – and they get to decide what is threatening – they are legally allowed to kill you. No plea, no legal defense, no nothing.

One of the mages in a group marked as “troublesome and set up to deliberately fail” is a woman with Down’s Syndrome.

…I cannot express my honest opinion of that without resorting to foul language. Because what. Someone knows this woman. Someone will miss this woman. Someone will raise holy hell to find out what happens if she ends up dead. And this is supposed to have been going on for decades? No. No way. Civil rights groups would have torn things to pieces.

(Also, minor detail, but in the alternate history’s WWII, mages were transporting a nuke and dropped it on Hiroshima instead, and Japan has cut off almost all contact with the U.S. since. I hate to point out the obvious, but that’s not how being on the losing side of a war works, people.)

So. Yeah. Excellent idea, nicely-drawn characters, stupid stupid magical dystopia. Sigh.

Edit Note: Oky, the title is My Luck, the series is Twisted Luck. Beware the perils of writing with your arrrrgh up….