A Handbook to Luck

by Cristina García

Book Overview

In the late 60s, three teenagers from around the globe are making their way in the world: Enrique Florit, from Cuba, living in southern California with his flamboyant magician father; Marta Claros, getting by in the slums of San Salvador; Leila Rezvani, a well-to-do surgeon's daughter in Tehran. We follow them through the years, surviving war, disillusionment, and love, as their lives and paths intersect. With its cast of vividly drawn characters,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0307276805
• ISBN13: 9780307276803
• Release Date: April 2008
• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.2" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Wise, Beautiful, and Emotionally Layered

"A Handbook To Luck," by Christina Garcia, is a lovely novel about the bittersweet roles that luck, coincidence, happenstance, and choice play in our lives. It's a very short novel that feels more like three intertwining novellas. The stories unfold chronologically as we follow three separate protagonists--Enrique Florit, the mathematically gifted Cuban-American son of a flamboyant professional magician; Marta Claros, a child of abject poverty from the slums of San Salvador; and Leila Rezvani, a wealthy and privileged daughter of an Iranian surgeon and his vain Russian wife. We watch their lives in brief snapshots from 1968 through 1987. We learn about the sorrows, joys, difficult decisions, and everyday pleasures that mark their existence as each struggles to build a decent and happy life. The character's lives cross paths in unexpected ways. Luck comes in many guises. Sometimes the characters recognize their good fortune and seize the moment, but at other times they are totally unaware of these golden opportunities and let them slip away. This is a book about choices, about the paths taken and not taken in our lives. The author, Christina Garcia, is a 48-year-old Cuban-American who studied political science and international relations at Barnard and Johns Hopkins before starting work as a journalist for "Time" magazine. Eventually, she turned her attention to writing poetry and novels. This work is her fifth novel. According to a newspaper interview about the book (Charleston, "Sunday Gazette," July 22, 2007), the author recently took up painting and is making an artist studio for herself in her Napa Valley, California, home. I wasn't the least bit surprised when I read this. Garcia's prose is filled with subtle lyrical nuance and vivid imagery-exactly what I'd expect from a writer who is also a poet and a painter. For me, reading her prose was what I enjoyed most about this short, wise, and emotionally layered work. This novel takes a large philosophical view on life, and it will probably cause readers to reminisce about their own lives and missed opportunities. The book gets only a three-and-a-half star rating from me (rounded up to 4-stars, here) primarily because I felt a bit let down by the end--I wanted more from the plot and the character's lives. But, the book is a beautiful, well-written story, and I recommend it. Don't hesitate to read it if you want a short, contemplative book that is as easy and quick to read, as it is beautiful and meaningful.

Great Characters rolling the dice of life

I really enjoyed the complexity and unique-ness of all three of the main characters. They each had their own motivations to drive their choices--which were not always noble, but true to their characters. While "luck" wasn't an obvious metaphor each character did take a chance and it was just as much a gamble for them as it was for the reader. For all three of the characters I was willing to follow the choices they made--not knowing who would turn out the big winner, or who would lose it all. Just like in life sometimes there were high stakes, and sometimes it was just about breaking even. The journey of this book is a good one to follow.

Expanding the horizons of Hispanic literature

Cristina Garcia brings an array of characters to her latest novel, including figures from Cuba and El Salvador, and thus adds to the dimensions of Hispanic writing in the United States. A splendid read!

A bittersweet novel

Cristina Garcia's "A Handbook to Luck" centered around Enrique, the son of a Las Vegas magician from Cuba who was a genius in mathematics and was thrown into the world of poker as he grew up in the casino environment. Enrique had always blamed his father, Fernando for his mother's death as she died from one of Fernando's acts. He met Leila, a beautiful girl from Iran who was in Las Vegas for a vacation before her arranged marriage to another Iranian. Leila had to make the ultimate decision of whether to stay with Enrique or to return to California where her fiance was waiting. Then, there was Marta, who wanted nothing but to leave El Salvador to seek a better life in the United States and to be away from her abusive husband. "A Handbook to Luck" focused on the intervowen lives of these three main characters from childhood to adult. This was a somewhat interesting read as the decisions that each of these characters made were life-changing and how by random chances that they met each other. This was a bittersweet, somwhat tragic and moving novel.