Luck’s a lady, sometimes

With dreams of travel and exploration on our overworked, in-need-of-a-vacation minds, Barbara Samuel’s “Lady Luck’s Map of Vegas” provides the perfect escape in her beautiful story of a mother-daughter relationship of travel and discovery.

India Redding is an independent 40-year-old woman with a successful Web-design business, a carefree lifestyle and a no-strings relationship with a wonderful man who lives thousands of miles away. And that’s just the way she likes it.

Until she discovers she is pregnant and has quite possibly fallen in love with the father of the baby — two things she had promised herself would never happen. Enter her newly widowed mother, Eldora, who wants to take a road trip along Route 66 in search of Gypsy, India’s twin sister, and we’ve got ourselves a wonderful literary trip in the making.

Gypsy suffers from paranoid schizophrenia and has been off her medication since the death of her father six months earlier. All India receives as clues to her sister’s whereabouts are voice-mail messages in the twin language India has long-since forgotten, as well as beautiful, hand-drawn postcards from Gypsy’s travels in the Southwest.

Barbara Samuel has given her readers a gift in telling the story of the Reddings. She has faithfully explored the mother-daughter dynamic, as well as sister-sister, and even husband-wife. “Lady Luck” is a breath of fresh air in the often oversaturated “self-discovery and relationship” genre of women’s fiction. Samuels’ honesty and straightforward storytelling gives life to her characters, their lives and their search for the truth.

“Lady Luck’s Map of Vegas” is like any new and exciting journey: When you get to the end, you wish there was a little more still to explore.