Two warring countries and one 'Lucky' little boy
Lucky Boy (Putnam, 469 pp., ***½ out of four stars) is a tale as old as Solomon — two women, both calling themselves mothers, fighting over a baby. But when the wise king gave his judgment, there was a true mother and a false one; one clear victim and one clear villain.
Things aren’t so straightforward in Shanthi Sekaran’s new novel. No one wants to split the baby — both parties want 100% of him.
This is the central conflict: In one corner is Solimar Castro Valdez, the young undocumented birth mother, trapped in immigrant detention; in the other are the foster parents, Kavya and Rishi Reddy, an Indian-American Berkeley couple in their 30s, smitten with little Ignacio El Viento Castro Valdez. But while the collision course is obvious, the actual battle for parenthood doesn’t begin until well into the novel. Ignacio — Nacho to Soli; Iggy to the Reddys — isn’t even born until almost 200 pages in.
In the meantime, we get to know the parents. Soli is a determined young woman, 18 when she crosses into the USA from Mexico at great personal cost, carrying the child of a love she’s already lost. She is poor and vulnerable, but instead of being burdened by Ignacio, who demands “her every drop of time, of milk, of sight,” she is anchored by him. He becomes her everything: “She was at the world’s mercy now, in a way she’d never known.” Of course, the world — and this country, in particular — is cruel to her, and Ignacio is taken away.
The Reddys are older and richer and protected from the abuses that plague Soli. Their suffering is on a different scale — career stress, family tension, infertility. So when they seek to adopt Ignacio, knowing full well that his mother is alive, their suit is unsympathetic on its face.
Yet Sekaran makes no easy judgments. She does the hard work of a thorough fiction writer and presents flawed characters aching with humanity. Kavya may be more fortunate than Soli, but she shares her biggest fear — that of losing Ignacio. She “had made a mansion of her love, but built it on shifting land.” Over the course of the book, all three parents cross some serious lines, but even their most appalling acts are viscerally understandable. Morality becomes almost irrelevant — their love is large and under threat, and it cannot be defended with clean hands.
This novel takes its time, and it could probably be shorter without losing much of its impact. But Sekaran’s prose is swift and engaging, her storytelling confident enough to justify the scenic route.
She takes us from rural Oaxaca to a Berkeley sorority house; from a Silicon Valley tech campus dripping with money to the shadowy nightmares of immigrant detention centers. There’s a rich secondary cast — Kavya’s relationship with her mother Uma could sustain a novel on its own.
It’s easy to imagine the lives of these characters even off the page. Lucky Boy pulses with vitality, pumped with the life breath of human sin and love.
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Steph Cha is author of the Juniper Song mystery series.