luck

What it's about (buy it)

On a hot August day in the heart of tobacco country, Harvey and Ox are driving County Route 1012, smashing mailboxes with a baseball bat. With one fateful swing, a bomb intended for the Olive family blows the boys to pieces, scattering their remains in the ditches and on both sides of the dotted yellow line.

Behind the explosion lies a story of young love, family feuds, and the cultural clash of a changing South—a place where Mexican migrant workers are transforming the face of North Carolina, one town at a time. In Cottesville, these migrant workers find an unlikely champion in 20-year-old Mike Olive, a rich farmer’s boy who’s returned home from college bent on social justice. Mike knows he can expect trouble from his family, his friends, and his old rival Harvey; what he does not expect to find is Hermelinda Salmeron, the extraordinary daughter of one of his father’s workers. With explosive energy, Luck lays bare the strange collision of fathers and sons, lovers and rivals, Mexico and the American South, and the future with the past.

How it happened

(from "Trying His Luck," printed in the Portland Press Herald, October 1, 2000, because I'm too lazy to sum it up myself...)

When Eric Martin was a student at Duke University in the late 1980s, his writing professor told him he wasn't particularly interested in anything Martin had written--but that, with a lot of hard work and a little luck, he didn't see why Martin couldn't be a writer someday.

What Martin's professor didn't know--and Martin never revealed--was that the writing student had already banged out an amazingly compelling scene on a borrowed word processor one steamy night that summer. One of those spontaneous acts of creativity that come unannounced and can't be ignored, it happened during Martin's summer internship in social work among migrant Hispanic workers on a tobacco farm in North Carolina. Martin thought the fruits of his labor were pretty good that night. He tucked the three or four pages away in duffle bag.

Nine years later, those pages, virtually unchanged, are the opening scene of LUCK, a first novel about a crusading college student and son of a wealthy North Carolina tobacco farmer who comes home to improve the living and working conditions for Hispanic migrant workers but stirs up old rivalries and animosities that lead to tragedy instead.... -more-

What they're saying

“An impressive story of love and of the struggle for social justice.” — J. M. Coetzee

"A wonderful first novel, one rich in characters, places, events and feelings...a marvelously wrought story out of the American heartland, one told with originality, a marvelous style and a generous spirit." --Boston Herald

"Tense and provocative....Martin deftly chronicles the plight of the Mexican migrants and illuminates the barriers that thwart understanding between Southern landowners and workers." --Publishers Weekly
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