Everything changes for Alice when she gives her best friend – and the boy she’s in love with – Teddy a lottery ticket for his eighteenth birthday… and he wins $140 million dollars the very next day. As two kids who have been through terrible things – Alice losing her parents within a year of each other and Teddy’s father abandoning their family – winning the jackpot seems like a dream come true. But as the days unfold, both teens soon discover more… about life, about themselves and about each other.
I was confident going into Windfall that I was going to enjoy it, as I’ve enjoyed all the other novels that Jennifer E. Smith has written, and I was right – it’s a good read. Like many of her stories, the plot sounds deceptively straightforward: a girl buys her best friend a lottery ticket as a joke for his eighteenth birthday, only for them both to discover that it’s a jackpot-winning ticket the next day. But there’s much more to it than winning the lottery, though readers do get to see Teddy’s all-out reaction to suddenly having millions of dollars at his fingertips. But there’s much more to this novel than meets the eye. It is also about family. About friendship. About self-identity. About grief. About growth. I was impressed by how Smith wove the themes together, and though a few things were over exaggerated or underdeveloped, I still found it solid overall.
Windfall is another great story from author Jennifer E. Smith. She writes realistic characters who are dealing with a variety of things, and adds just a little bit of ‘magic’ to their lives– in this case, in the form of a jackpot-winning lottery ticket. I found this novel quite compelling from beginning to end, and would recommend checking it out.
Windfall by Jennifer E. Smith
Publisher: Delacorte Press | Publication Date: May 2, 2017
Source: ARC received from the publisher (Thanks!)
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