Story for the Week
Liverpool—home of The Beatles and of Corinne for another five weeks. When we found out Corinne would be spending a semester at Liverpool Hope University, I immediately started looking for things we could do the week before her classes began.
I was a little young to be part of the Fab Four frenzy, but my sister’s best friend who is four years older than I am, grew up down the street, with whom we spent tons of overnights, loved The Beatles. And that’s how I was introduced to The Beatles and learned to love them myself. I still have two of their collections on vinyl.
Even after they broke up, I followed their music and individual careers. I was heartbroken at the loss of John Lennon, whose life was taken much too soon. And I had the opportunity to see Paul McCartney perform live during his Flowers in the Dirt tour in 1989. Not surprisingly, still one of the most amazing shows I’ve ever seen.
So when you’re going to the place where John, Paul, George, and Ringo grew up, you have to take a tour, right? Corinne enjoys bus tours anyway, so I promised I wouldn’t make her do an all-day tour, but I told her there was no way we weren’t doing a tour.
It was about an hour and a half through the city and the area where John and Paul grew up. We passed both their childhood homes, Penny Lane, Strawberry Field, and through the neighborhood described in the song “Penny Lane.” I have to admit it was pretty cool seeing the inspiration for the song.
Corinne and I had dinner at The Cavern Club Restaurant that evening, which is across a lane from The Cavern Club. If I had stayed another day, I could have gone to a Beatles tribute show at The Cavern Club with Corinne’s school group. I hated to miss it, but I had a flight back home that morning. Next time.
The author of the book below thanks The Beatles in her acknowledgements. They inspired one of the characters and the first scene she wrote in the book. I highlighted the passage when I read it…just because I liked it. “Marmalade sky reflecting off the surface, casting everything in an orange glow. It would normally be such a scenic picture, something ripped straight out of a song.”
I’ve been periodically whistling Beatles tunes since I arrived home. They just randomly pop into my head…probably because my whole heart is in Liverpool right now. She’s having fun, making new friends, planning travel around Europe, and learning to adult and make her own way in the world. The songs are a nice distraction for me, and let’s be honest…Lennon and McCartney were fantastic storytellers. So is Stacy Willingham.
Book Review
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
5 Stars for Only If You’re Lucky by Stacy Willingham
375 pages
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Publication Date: January 16, 2024
Purchased on Amazon.
Publisher’s Description
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.
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Main Characters:
- Margot – studying English at Rutledge College, finds herself drawn to the popular and confident Lucy who reminds her of her best friend Eliza who died three weeks after they graduated high school
- Lucy – “leader” of a trio of girls at Rutledge, invites Margot to room with them sophomore year in a second house run by the Kappa Nu fraternity
- Nicole and Sloane – the other two girls in the trio with Lucy, Nicole is dating the president of Kappa Nu, which is the reason they pay very low rent to stay in the house
- Levi – a year behind Margot in school, was the last person to see Eliza alive, starts at Rutledge in Margot’s sophomore year and is a legacy in Kappa Nu
What a twisted and fascinating book this is! I feel like I should have figured out more of the secrets before they were revealed, but I think I was just so drawn in by this slow burn story that I missed them. It kind of reminded me of the first time I watched The Sixth Sense. I wanted to immediately watch it again to see the things that were clearly revealed that I somehow missed. When I finished this, I thought to myself, “I should have picked up on that, but I’m so glad I didn’t.”
Margot is at the end of her freshman year at Rutledge, which she had planned to attend with Eliza, her best friend since kindergarten who tragically died three weeks after their high school graduation. Instead, Margot is randomly matched with her roommate Maggie and spends her freshman year playing it safe, keeping her head down, but distracted by the charismatic Lucy who reminds her of Eliza.
Lucy exudes confidence, and one seemingly random day, she chooses to befriend Margot and then invites her to live in the Kappa Nu house with her, Sloane, and Nicole. Margot almost can’t help herself. She ditches Maggie, moves into the house for the summer, and becomes Lucy’s best friend. When the fall term begins and Margot discovers Levi will be attending Rutledge and living in the Kappa Nu house, she feels her past and present colliding.
The story unfolds in two timelines—before Levi’s death and Lucy’s disappearance and after, and all of it from Margot’s point of view. We learn about Margot and Eliza’s relationship leading up to Eliza’s death and how much Margot was a part of Eliza’s family. She and Eliza were inseparable. In fact, she had a more loving relationship with Eliza’s parents than with her own.
Once Margot meets Lucy, she seems to have the same type of inseparable (and a bit obsessive) relationship with Lucy. But Margot and her friends spend a lot of time drinking, so we have to consider Margot a bit unreliable as a narrator. She portrays Levi as suspicious because he was the last to see Eliza alive, but can we trust her? Lucy, Sloane, and Nicole all seem to have their own secrets…some that they keep from Margot and others they keep from each other.
I won’t give away any other details. Willingham’s writing is fantastic, and I really got absorbed into this story. I discovered Willingham a couple of years ago, and she has become a fast favorite.
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