<em>The Lucky Ones</em> Is No Ordinary Coming-of-Age Novel

No book, of course, should be judged by its cover—but how to categorize a book with two very different ones? Julianne Pachico’s thrilling debut, , billed as “a novel” on the front of the American version and, by its English publisher, as a “,” manages the feat of making the question irrelevant. Each chapter is, on the surface, a self-contained story with its own narrator, set in a particular time and place. Yet each story haunts the others—echoing, amplifying, complicating them. One character’s fleeting thoughts turn out to concern another’s deepest trauma; shared memories are cast in contradictory lights. And though every taut chapter clarifies a plot whose whole is greater