Blah

The Thing About Luck by Cynthia Kadohata was just OK for me.  It hits some interesting points of interest: minorities, farming, first kisses, rotten boys, odd family; however, it still manages to be bland.  Go figure.

It is the story of 12-year-old Summer, whose family is Japanese.  Her family works driving huge harvesting machines that harvest wheat.  They travel through the wheat fields of Texas, Oklahoma, and north.  They work long hours, under much pressure.  This season, Summer's parents are in Japan tending to family business, so she is working with her Japanese grandparents.  She must deal with their strictness, her "weird" younger brother, and her first crush.  

I learned much about the harvest process, as well as a little about being Japanese-American, but, there was almost too much about that, and not enough about the other.  Oddly, however, there is too much kissy girl stuff to appeal to the hard-to-reach boy segment that would appreciate the farming aspect.