It's 1934, and Melia Hoyle is a 14-year-old mechanic in Walnut Ridge, Va., scrambling to keep her younger siblings in her custody and holding the despicable Harley Blevins at bay. Blevins runs a chain of gas stations, and will stop at nothing to get his hands on Brenda's Oasis, the station Melia took over when her mother died. Melia concocts a crazy plan to take in an "old bum" and pass him off as her long-lost daddy. Hiram Watts is "a heap of mud and hair, a cotton shirt, and a pair of torn-up trousers planted squarely in the path to pump number two" when she first encounters him, but he soon proves his worth ten times over as a businessman... and a father figure.
Joining the ranks of Scout from Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Frankie from Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding, Melia is a southern force to be reckoned with. "I don't know nothing 'bout--'bout feeling. All I know is fighting. And holding on. At the end of the day, I don't got much left for nothing else." Any one of the intriguing cast of characters of Lucky Strikes--the gruff, protective truckers, Harley's bumbling, blushing nephew Dudley, the down-at-the-heels lawyer still carrying a torch for Melia's mama--could make a splendid protagonist, but tough-tender Melia tops them all. Although Louis Bayard is best known for his historical mysteries (The Pale Blue Eye) and his Downton Abbey recaps in the New York Times, his foray into young adult literature may be his finest work yet. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor