Book Review - "Lucky Girl"

Book Review

Lucky Girl

by Allie Tagle-Dokus

published 2025 by TinHouse

I recently reviewed a novel that employed ballet as a container for its story. Meaning that dance was indeed a narrative throughline, but at its core, the book wasn’t really ‘about’ ballet. Instead, it became the space, backdrop and world in which the tale unfolded. The result: making it a book for a much wider audience, as opposed to only dance enthusiasts. Allie Tagle-Dokus’ Lucky Girl, recently published by TinHouse, takes a similar approach, and does so with skill and aplomb. Dance is certainly an overwhelming presence from Lucky Girl’s opening pages through its final moments. But the story is about much more. It’s about relationships within the familial system as well as outside it. Achievements. Disappointments. It’s about growing up too quickly and trying to survive in bizarre circumstances. Lost connections and lost innocence. Unsafe, even criminal situations. Mistakes and mistaken trust. And guilt. It is no surprise that it has already made an appearance on ‘best of’ lists.

Like a play, movie or narrative ballet, Lucky Girl is portioned into ‘acts,’ and the story really gets going towards the end of Act I. At this point, the protagonist Lucy, gets cast in a dance reality show’s youth version. I’m not a reality show fan but felt that the author did a great job mining that genre’s manipulated drama and tenuous connection to ‘reality.’ Through a creepy and off-putting connection with one of the young adult female judges on the show, Lucy descends into the storied world of a child star. Tagle-Dokus cleverly named that judge character Bruise, foreshadowing to the reader that Lucy would be marked and wounded by this relationship.

As Lucky Girl continues, there are both expected plot points and surprise pivots in Lucy’s personal and professional trajectory. She tours with music stars. Books a series of movies and television shows. She struggles to find ease and talent in other performative art disciplines besides dance. She navigates difficult and spiky personalities. Living far from home, she must contend with a family system jolted by serious diagnoses. And as the reader rounds the mid-point of the book, it’s easy to forget that Lucy is only in her mid-teens. 

Soon thereafter, fame, bad decisions, optics, personal revelations and social media converge in a truly chaotic hailstorm. And then comes the book’s final act – its denouement – where Lucy not only begins charting her own course but also comes to terms with some deep truths from her past. 

Tagle-Dokus employed a number of intriguing structural motifs throughout the novel. First, she provided concurrent perspectives. In many parts of the book, two columns of prose are shown side by side detailing how two characters interpreted the same situation. Not only did that emphasize and highlight how different individuals may perceive the same events, but also gave the reader agency in how they chose to engage with those parts of the story. Second, script sides show up from time to time in the body of the text, mirroring Lucy’s burgeoning performing arts/media career. Last, Tagle-Dokus tells her story in short, digestible chapters, like scenes from a television show or a movie.

At just 350 pages, Lucky Girl is on the lengthier side, though at the same time, an easy read. I think it feels lengthy to me because the meat of the story gets going around seventy pages in (a tad late in the game for my taste). Having said that, Lucky Girl is both engaging and thoughtful. With summer not too far away, I bet it will become a frequent beach day companion.