Genre: Fantasy - Dystopia

Age: Young Adult

Part fantasy, part historical, part dystopian, mix in some western and you have a young adult novel that’ll keep you gripped to its pages and willing this one to have a happy ending.

Their lives are supposed to be charmed. Their parents were promised they’d be well looked after and cared for, fed and kept healthy when their parents can do without another mouth to feed and sell them to the Welcome Houses. But the reality is very different, and on her first night as a ‘sundown girl’, Clementine accidentally kills a man. With no other option and with their faces branded, Aster, her sister, plans a dangerous escape. But they’re not the only Good Luck Girls who want out.

I really liked the directions this headed in, as the girls make their escape, try to survive in the wilderness, and grow closer with one another. Aster starts off focused on keeping Clementine safe, but as the girls spend more time together, she starts getting protective over all of them. The times when things run smooth are misleading, and the girls soon find themselves in dangerous situation after dangerous situation.

The characters were all nicely fleshed out, with their own motivations and goals that sharpened the more time spent with them. I loved the world building here, too. Arketta is a horror fantasy version of the ‘wild west’, where some are born without shadows. There are ghosts who roam through this wasteland, and evil capitalists who have enough money no one really cares what they do, especially to Good Luck Girls.

In a strange way, the girls are a little sheltered thanks to their lives in the Welcome House. The ‘daybreak girls’ act as maids, performing domestic duties around the house, with little understanding of what happens once they become ‘sundown girls’, instead seeing the transition as something to be honoured about and excited for. There’s a stark contrast at the start of the book between Aster and Violet – both sundown girls – and Tansy and Mallow, both daybreak girls. Clementine acts as a bridge between the two, as the night the story starts is her first night as a sundown girl, and once she realises what is planned, she kills the man trying to force himself on her. Tansy and Mallow are pleased for her as she prepares for the night, but her sister Aster keeps the worst parts to herself, simply telling Clementine to think of a song and lose herself in it.

Their journey allows them to see how others in the Scab – a desert/wasteland - live, and to extract a small amount of revenge on Aster’s and Violet’s parts for what they have been through. The other girls are a little more trusting, but Aster and Violet view all men now through the same lens, unable to see them as anything except the kind of men who frequented the Welcome House.

There’s so much that happens in this book, and it really is a great coming-of-age adventure, exploring themes of class, race, gender, poverty and more against a Western Fantasy backdrop. It’s well-written, totally engaging, with a wonderfully bittersweet yet satisfying ending, and I really looked forward to reading The Sisters of Reckoning, the sequel to The Good Luck Girls. It’s worth noting, too, the other book this reminded me strongly of, with the not-quite-but-could-be post-apocalyptic western vibe, was Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, but this is much more female focused. If you’re looking for a different take on a similar aesthetic, this one is worth picking up.

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Review by Elle Turpitt

Twitter & Instagram: @elleturpitt

www.elleturpitt.com

I received this ebook from Hot Key Books via NetGalley for review consideration.