Summary

“Lucky,” the first story of the collection, takes place in 2003, in Valle del Cauca, and is told in the present tense by a third-person limited narrator, focalized through a young teenage girl, Stephanie Lansky. Stephanie is left alone in her family’s house when the rest of her family attends a dinner party. As the mother leaves, she warns Stephanie to let the servant, Angelina, answer the phone or get the door, remind Stephanie that if anyone asks, “[their family is] not in the country anymore” (5). After her parents leave, Stephanie reviews her plans to meet the football team at the local mall, thinking she will accept the boys’ attention “with the same icy sense of destiny that she accepts everything else in her life” (6).

Stephanie reads fantasy novels to pass the time and goes to sleep. The next morning, the doorbell...