Books like The Higher Power of Lucky
Lucky’s story leaves an appetite for another fiercely observant child confronting grief and abandonment among eccentric adults—something funny without making pain small, and hopeful without becoming sugary.
If you liked The Higher Power of Lucky, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with The Higher Power of Lucky, and we tell you exactly what.
Primrose Squarp refuses to believe that her parents, missing at sea, are dead, even as the adults in her small town arrange her life around that assumption. Like Lucky, she is resourceful because she has to be, and her stubbornness is both comic and heartbreakingly protective.
Horvath surrounds her with fallible, peculiar adults rather than tidy rescuers; the most memorable is Miss Bowzer, who serves every dish on a waffle and offers Primrose the rare dignity of being listened to. A Newbery Honor book, it has Lucky’s precious balance of deadpan absurdity, peril, loneliness, and faith in improvised family. Its oddness is irresistible, but its emotional accuracy is what makes readers keep it.
Summer has already lost one family when Aunt May and Uncle Ob take her into their ramshackle West Virginia home and love her without reserve. Then May dies, leaving Summer to watch Ob’s grief threaten the home they created together.
This slender Newbery Medal winner has the spaciousness of poetry: every image, silence, and homely object carries feeling. Readers who loved Lucky’s longing for signs that she will not be abandoned will recognize Summer’s vigilant tenderness. Rylant never sentimentalizes grief; she shows how love persists through ordinary gestures, strange hopes, and the presence of an unexpectedly loyal friend. Few novels this short leave such a large emotional wake.
Gilly enters a new foster home armed with brilliance, contempt, and a plan not to need anyone. Her sharp tongue and schemes are thrillingly funny, but Paterson lets us see the fear beneath them: attachment is dangerous when every home has proved temporary.
Lucky’s fans will understand Gilly even when she behaves badly. Both girls test love because merely asking for reassurance would expose too much. Trotter, Gilly’s unconventional foster mother, is no idealized savior, and that makes their collision of wills feel alive. Winner of the National Book Award and a Newbery Honor, Paterson’s novel remains exceptional for refusing easy consolation while making an uncompromising case for the bonds people build rather than inherit.