We Wish You Luck

A Novel

By: Caroline Zancan

Narrated by: Kristen Sieh

A Belletrist Book Club Selection
Named a Best Book of 2020 by goop, ELLE and Vanity Fair
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2020 by The Millions, Lit Hub, Marie Claire

An exhilarating novel about a group of students who take revenge on a wunderkind professor after she destroys one of their own-- a story of collective drive to create, sabotage, and ultimately, to love.

It doesn't take long for the students on Fielding campus to become obsessed with Hannah, Leslie and Jimmy. The three graduate students are mysterious, inaccessible, and brilliant. Leslie, glamorous and brash, has declared that she wants to write erotica and make millions. Hannah is quietly confident, loyal, elegantly beautiful, and the person they all want to be; and Jimmy is a haunted genius with no past. After Simone - young, bestselling author and erstwhile model - shows up as a visiting professor, and after everything that happened with her, the trio only become more notorious.

Love. Death. Revenge. These age-old tropes come to life as the semesters unfold. The threesome came to study writing, to be writers, and this is the story they've woven together: of friendship and passion, of competition and envy, of creativity as life and death. Now, they submit this story, We Wish You Luck, for your reading pleasure.

Read this book in a day

Beautiful & delicious. I have to write 13 more lines but I really don’t know what else to say. This was a succinct and loving novel, I could’ve read 100 more pages of it.

This book is very boring

Like, very.
Not that I was wondering if an MFA has any value, but if I had been this would be enough to warn me off.

Dynamic but feels forced

My master’s program was adjacent to an MFA program so I attended a couple of workshops. This felt like an MFA experiment/project in which the author plays with point of view, plot exposition, multiple simultaneous narrators, etc., etc. I don’t know if it is completely successful but the author gave it her all. I got frustrated with the triteness a few times but ultimately kept reading because I was successfully drawn in. And keeping a reader reading is a skill. Didn’t love the narrator for an adult novel.