Fiction Trade Paperback
ISBN: 1-932961-16-X
6 x 9 / 336 Pages / $14.95 / May 2006
Fiction Hardcover
ISBN: 1-932961-04-6
6 x 9 / 352 Pages / $23.95 / April 2005
Summary | Praise | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Widgets | Bio | Events
A May 2005 BookSense Notable!
"I'm really liking Lucky Strike though if ever I want a movie to come out for a book, this would be it. The author has amazing descriptions and really great relationship development but I'm still struggling—in a good way because characters continue to develop as the story does—to know "who this person is". I love it though, and these people are VERY intriguing, different and from a sort of remote time and place—so I don't have an "image" (or even actor) in mind sometimes. And this is what makes it so captivating as a book. The author inches you along on the character development so what you thought you knew about the person, you might not. A very new, different, creative style of writing." —Sharen Borgias
"These are characters the reader won’t have met before....vibrant and original. Those who find themselves reading Lucky Strike this summer will be more than grateful for their own good fortune." —NewPages.com
"The search for a fresh start is a classic American story, and one that Zafris makes new with this novel….Low-key but persuasive, this period piece evokes the innocence of an earlier era and underscores the desperation and hope of the eclectic bunch this mom and her kids meet in their pursuit of the new gold." —Good Housekeeping / The Book Babes
"What a wild ride this book is. The characters are plucky, sympathetic, and memorable, the situations sometimes laugh-out-loud funny and sometimes bittersweet, and the pacing just right. Zafris is a keen observer of the human comedy." —Library Journal
"Likable and thought-provoking…another winner." —The Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Laced with quiet tongue-in-cheek humor and told from multiple viewpoints, the adventures of this quirky cast of characters makes for a warmhearted, entertaining read."-THE DENVER POST "Zafris' writing lets emotions and memories penetrate each other the way they do in ordinary thought, though seldom in fiction. Sometimes you have to go back and see what's really being said…Yet each of Zafris' sentences is as sharp-edged as a miner's pick, and to have to reread one occasionally is a pleasure." —Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
"All learn that love and friendship endure beyond fortune. In Zafris' disturbing and ironic novel, the universe operates under skies where the laws of atomic energy are highly visible…[the ending] haunts long after the reader puts the book down." —The Oregonian
"Eerie…[a] noir-tinged adventure story…One could read Lucky Strike as a historical portrait of a time and place. All the realistic details, though, reverberate with unsettling implications. The characters don't know how poisonous their environment is, but readers know—and dread the future effects on the characters of the uranium they long to find." —The Columbus Dispatch
"The key to this intriguing historical character is the irony that the reader knows the effect of radioactivity while the prospectors earn their living searching and selling uranium scrap. The cast comes across as if Bret Harte's classic the Outcasts of Poker Flat was brought into the Eisenhower era. Similar in tone to Nancy Zafris' previous distinctive The Metal Shredders, fans will take immense armchair pleasure visiting a unique realm that has a Twilight Zone feel to it yet somehow this talented author makes her characters seem genuine inside a weirdly entertaining 1950s drama." —Harriet Klausner, blether.com
"In this lovely book, Zafris finds power in the slow, mute strangeness of everyday anxiety, the blossoming of hope in a barren desert and the terrible irony of what uranium means to those who seek it." —Publishers Weekly
"Zafris ... invests her offbeat material with deep emotion and tragic undertones. Charlie's debilitating illness and the effects of uranium poisoning (unknown at the time) sit in counterpoint to the loopy banter and endearing cast of characters. Like Marianne Wiggins' quirky, superb Evidence of Things Uness (2003), this novel is both disturbing and hypnotic." —Booklist
"Funny and touching." —Pages Magazine
"The strength of Lucky Strike is thanks in part to its quirky cast of characters ... These characters ... come together in an age of innocence, before humans fully understood the effects of radiation. They pool their strengths and offset each other's weaknesses as they work towards the common goal of hitting a lucky strike…This was a book of many fascinating layers…I cared about the characters and their individual fates. That's what good writing is all about." —Midwest Book Review
"As in her previous novel The Metal Shredders, Zafris here paints a vivid picture of people on the edges of society. In Lucky Strike, quirky self-styled Uranium prospectors seeking to get rich or maybe just get away unite in their quests with surprising thought-provoking results." —Steve Turnbull, Joseph-Beth
"Zafris is an abundantly talented writer." —The New York Times Book Review
"Funny and surprisingly poignant story. ... the eccentricities of plot, setting and character here are delightful." —The Baltimore Sun
"The Metal Shredders is a trashy novel in the best sense: It takes place in a junk yard. And the taboos it breaks aren't sexual... . No, it dares to raise the only subject that still makes Americans uncomfortable: class." —The Christian Science Monitor
Nancy Zafris is a Flannery O'Connor Award winner for her story collection, The People I Know. Currently the fiction editor of The Kenyon Review, she lives in Columbus, Ohio.
Late at night, with the children asleep, Jean still kept an eye on the trailer. It would explain something to her if Jo were to go inside to be with him. She was curious how it worked with other people. It wasn't that mysterious that Jo had married someone like Leonard Dawson—it didn't flabbergast her the way it did Harry, who was beside himself trying to figure it out. If Jo went inside to be with him in the trailer, that was all the figuring out she needed. She wouldn't blame her. In its own way it was something hard to resist.
But Jo stayed outside and sat on the trailer step, staring out. Now and then she turned and stared at Jean. She stared as if she had the freedom to, as if she couldn't be spotted in the dark. Yet they could see each other's faces pretty clearly. The moon was up and their eyes had adjusted. Jean thought Jo looked like some creature. She had stopped being a woman, a human. And in the way you watch any creature, she was waiting for it to make its move.
The creature looked right at her, then stood up and matter of factly moved away. In a few minutes it made its reappearance, stooping to pick up the wads of paper strewn over the campsite, returning them to a pile near the stove. It proceeded across the boundary line, melted into the darkness and then re-emerged, standing before Jean, an offering. Jean could smell it, that perfume that lifted off the tent. The tent was eight feet by eleven. It would be hell to pack up in the morning. "If you want, you can sleep in there," she said.
Jo played with the pleats of her dress. "I would really like something else to wear."
With a flashlight Jean directed her to a corner of the tent piled with clothes she could choose from. When Jo reappeared, she was wearing a man's undershirt. "Does that feel better?" Jean asked. Jo put a blanket around her shoulders and sat outside with Jean. Jean wondered if she would remember this moment, this silence, this sky of stars. She wanted to. She didn't have faith that she would.