Only If You’re Lucky by Stacy Willingham

This book was sent to Traveling With T for review consideration.

Only If You’re Lucky

Summary: Lucy Sharpe is larger than life. Magnetic, addictive. Bold and dangerous. Especially for Margot, who meets Lucy at the end of their freshman year at a liberal arts college in South Carolina. Margot is the shy one, the careful one, always the sidekick and never the center of attention. But when Lucy singles her out at the end of the year, a year Margot spent studying and playing it safe, and asks her to room together, something in Margot can’t say no—something daring, or starved, or maybe even envious.

And so Margot finds herself living in an off-campus house with three other girls, Lucy, the ringleader; Sloane, the sarcastic one; and Nicole, the nice one, the three of them opposites but also deeply intertwined. It’s a year that finds Margot finally coming out of the shell she’s been in since the end of high school, when her best friend Eliza died three weeks after graduation. Margot and Lucy have become the closest of friends, but by the middle of their sophomore year, one of the fraternity boys from the house next door has been brutally murdered… and Lucy Sharpe is missing without a trace.

A tantalizing thriller about the nature of friendship and belonging, about loyalty, envy, and betrayal—another gripping novel from an author quickly becoming the gold standard in psychological suspense.

Traveling With T’s Thoughts:

After reading and really enjoying All The Dangerous Things and A Flicker In the Dark, when I saw Only If You’re Lucky was on Netgalley, I requested.

However, a IG friend did warn me that this was a slow burn. But man, did I not anticipate how sloooooooooooooooooow of a burn it would be.

In the first 2-3 chapters, I began to think this was a much watered down version of The Girls Are All So Nice Here, but that was not how it turned out. It just took forever for some action to start happening and by the time the action did start happening, I was somewhere between “meh and lukewarm” on this book. I don’t read YA books, but this seemed to have a younger audience feel and I realize these girls were in college and they are young, even though they think they are grown- but I feel Stacy’s 2 earlier books straddled a better line of being great reads for older and younger women. Just my 2 cents, though. YMMV.

What I Liked:

The cover is fantastic.

The actual ending. When everything ties together.

Bottom line: This book could have had at least 100 pages taken out and I think that would have been better for me. It was a times almost too angsty (again, perhaps considering the age of the characters). For me, it was just not up to the standards I have come to expect from Stacy Willingham. Fingers crossed book 4 satisfies like Book 1 and 2 did.

*This book was sent to Traveling With T for review consideration. All thoughts and opinions are mine alone.*