Beyond Lucky by Sarah Aronson

I recently decided to re-read Beyond Lucky by Sarah Aronson. It’s been a few years since I first read this, and I remember it fondly. I had an interesting story behind getting my copy; in 5th or 6th grade, I won a writing competition in my school and I was able to progress to the state level and meet a lot of authors. I met a lot of pretty famous authors, and I bought this autographed copy at the store.

Beyond Lucky is about a 12 year old named Ari Fish who believes in two things: Wayne Timcoe (the most famous soccer player to come out of his town) and luck. The book starts when Ari finds a sports card of Wayne Timcoe and believes that it will bring him great luck. However, trouble starts when his beloved card goes missing. Ari goes through a lot of struggles, which he attributes to the lost card, and is determined to find out who took the card. Before everything goes wrong, he must learn how to make things work his own way without luck. 

Overall I thought this book was pretty good, but there were some unnecessary parts that I think the plot would be fine without. However, I feel like this book is something that you could read quickly after ingesting something much more complex, like Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Haha. The author did a good job combining all the different aspects together; the middle-school challenges and personal lessons like learning how to solve conflicts are bound in a very convincing manner. Taking in consideration the style that this book is written in, I would’ve appreciated a cleaner ending, but I can sort of understand the bittersweet note that this story ends on. I think that if I could, I would make a few plot changes to this book but as it is right now, I think it deserves a good 3.8/5

-Ryan