Lucky is an irreverent collection of minute narratives, snapshots of a little life in New York. These stories and sketches, originally published in three separate parts, really develop as the book goes on. Like her friends said they would, it looks like her work only got better after being lost and redrawn. The third section was much more captivating; I, as a reader, was so much more engaged and the narratives themselves were flayed out much more delicately. Recounting such 'quiet' and subtle stories takes a careful hand; it is easy to lose the point of the story.

Lucky #1 struck me as a bit redundant. The title, obviously, is sarcastic. The narrator is drawn in short, straight lines. Her face is very plain and open and her eyes are mere dots. The first thing we discover about her is that she is inhibited, shy, painfully self conscious. We are introduced to her boyfriend, Tom, who seems to have no personality. The entire book deals with the difficulty finding a room in New York City. The subject matter is a known factor of city life for most readers, presumably. What, then, is Bell illuminating that wasn't already known? She seems to withhold details that would focus in on her characters and make this story 'too personal' which keeps the reader at arm's length, unable to connect to them. In these first stories, the narrative felt more like a journal entry than a plot.

Lucky #2 begins with noticeably different line quality to the artwork. The frames on the first page (45) are large and the narrator is depicted in each one with dark, steady lines. She seems to have grown in her technique since the publication of the first book. The characters started to gain some flesh during the "farm upstate" scenes. The narrator reveals her interdependence on them, which we hadn't really seen in the first book. Without the context of her social life, with its own lexicon, references, and style, the story is hard to draw meaning from. Meeting the gang helped solidify her point of view as a narrator and I got the hang of her jokes and perspective. The scene with the walkie talkies displayed their lives in action as opposed to in retrospect as in some of the other bits.

I was particularly intrigued by her attempt to meditate on page 54- "I thought, if I sit still enough, I will gain some kind of deeper understanding. Reality will break open, I'll become a fuller person, and see things closer to how they really are." She sits, she waits, and "nothing special" happens. This little bit indicated the larger question of the rest of the book. She's looking. She's looking for her self to settle into itself and for life to start being great! or meaningful or worthy, but the days just seem to peel back like so much pith revealing... another day gone, and nothing more... lucky. Page 54 is also the last page of the first half of the book which seems to have no solid black filling in the panels. The rest of the book is riddled with half-dark frames full of shadows and sunglasses. Life is getting heavy! Or at least more full of contrast. There is also a lot more use of quiet panels without dialogue or narration.

She presents another scene in which the esoteric Buddhist connection is sought after. The scene after her yoga class with friend, Andy, seemed to reflect back to the earlier passage at the farm. In it, Andy  talks enthusiastically about reincarnation and how comforting it is to believe in, "I don't know how anyone can be creative and believe that this is all there is" (65). He invites her to come to class saying she will love his yoga teacher. The yoga teacher also talks a lot about reincarnation and uses Gabrielle as an example in his lecture. He congratulates her for accomplishing in one class what he had spent his life trying to learn. As a voyeur, this scene plays differently. Gabrielle's face in the drawings is tortured, her body is quaking, and she seems to fall and crash out of every position. He tells us she must have been a yogi in her past life. As she leaves the class, there are five pointed frames of her waiting at a bus stop. Alongside her, curled up on a bench, is a person sleeping. Presumably, he is smelly, and homeless. She leaves on the bus, and the last frame focuses in on only him, with big wavy lines rising off of his body. Perhaps she is wondering who he was in a past life, and what he had done to deserve his current position. These scenes lend the work a larger, more interesting question than, "where can I get a good room in New York?"

As her interest in her work deepened, so did mine. The last third had me surprised, laughing, and dog-earring pages. I loved the French kids!! I loved the dad of the French kids.  I loved the whole Francophile bit. The kissing lesson was great. The wit and humor quotient goes up, but continues to gnaw at the same question. On page 95, at her new, great jewelry job, she says, "...the tedium is excruciating. It builds up as a profound blankness that stretches out across the day, five days across the week, weeks piling up on to years, boredom layered up on loneliness, a gaping emptiness, directly contradicting the rich life I had intended to live". The narrator never seems to make any break-throughs on this question, this emptiness swallowing her life. She just plods on. The book ends with her and Tom literally being swallowed up into the banal little hole in the New York apartment wall. Like The Nothing of The Neverending Story, it goes on forever, destroying everything in its path, unless one has the courage to dream oneself out of it.