HAPPY GIRL LUCKY

Hope is an ostrich: She’s been “ostrichsized” by her family, but since she’s happy girl lucky, she doesn’t let it get her down.

Home-schooled, alone too much—perhaps the cause of her frequent malapropisms?—Londoner Hope is waiting to turn 16, at which point her celebrity family, the legendary acting dynasty the Valentines, will let her take acting roles, attend public events, and do interviews. Not that the paparazzi have been kind, what with reporting that her parents are divorcing. Hope is sure her parents have a loving relationship, and she’s eager to find “The One” for herself, too. By consulting horoscopes and filtering life events by rewriting them as swoony, romantic scenes in a film script, Hope creates a cheerful and unintentionally comic world where even her siblings’ criticisms of her (mostly) roll off her back. When she finally crosses paths with a special boy, he turns out to be self-absorbed, and it’s her father’s new girlfriend, of all people, who helps Hope open her eyes and truly experience life as it happens. Hope is ridiculously charming and, ultimately, not so daft after all. As for her unconventional turns of phrase? She may actually be expressing precisely what she means. Hope’s mother is cued as White; her father is African American.

Hilarious and delightful.