Rowena’s review of Penguin Luck by Kay Mupetson.

In the novel Penguin Luck, Doreen Lowe is a young, sophisticated junior associate in a small Manhattan law firm that primarily serves the lower echelons of society. Regularly visited by three ghosts, Doreen is forced to listen to their pleas that she “carry on for them”- after the Holocaust- all while balancing the demands of her career and personal life.

After Doreen marries a banker with an entrepreneurial spirit, he achieves his dream of establishing a telecommunications company. Within a few years, Doreen is serving as the company’s legal counsel while simultaneously raising a son, but is still being tormented by her spirits. As the young couple rides out the tech boom of the late 1990s, Doreen must reconcile her unorthodox personal choices with her widowed father, her friends, and her large conscience.

Penguin Luck is a compelling tale about one woman’s emotional journey as she learns to cope with a burdensome family history, a trio of determined ghosts, and the power of luck.

Being a romance reader at heart, it was very hard for me to like this story and to like Doreen and Ty. Did I want them to end up together? Yeah but the way that they got together left a sour taste in my mouth that didn’t quite go away while reading this book. You see, when we first meet Doreen, she’s engaged to Peter. You can tell right off the bat that things aren’t as peachy as Peter thinks they are and you know that he’s not the one for Doreen. You think these things because there’s banker Ty who’s sexy and who has sizzling chemistry with Doreen but when Doreen and Ty finally get married, she’s still engaged to Peter.

Doreen and Ty were hooking up all the while she was still engaged to Peter and that wasn’t cool with me. Her cheating on Peter didn’t make sense since it didn’t move the story along and really, it just wasn’t needed since there was so many other things were going on. She’s got these three ghosts that won’t leave her alone, she’s got her father and the other Holocaust survivors breathing down her neck about everything under the damn sun and there was just too much bad in this book for me to enjoy it.

I understood that Max (Doreen’s father) wanted Doreen to keep the family line going and pure by marrying another Jewish boy but the way that he kept making her feel guilty about her choice in partner (and not the way in which she got with said partner). I mean, she was all he had left and yet instead of enjoying her and accepting her, he made her feel guilty about everything. I didn’t get it.

I wasn’t a fan of the ghosts either, I sympathized with them but the way that they kept harping on Doreen and then yelled and screamed when Doreen didn’t do what they wanted started pissing me off midway through the book.

I enjoyed the friendships and the bonds that Doreen had with both Regina and Lily. That was actually my favorite part of the book because aside from Jack (Ty and Doreen’s son), they were the only good/happy part of the book…in my eyes.

Doreen had a lot of stuff going on in her life. She had her doubts about her hasty marriage to Ty, the ghosts being pissed off at her for marrying Ty, her estranged relationship with her father because of her marriage to Ty and then she finds out that Ty has been keeping a secret from her and things just keep sucking for her. Just when you think you can’t take anymore depressing news, more depressing news happen. I get it, Doreen is an extremely strong, capable woman. I didn’t need one bad blow after another to convince me of that.

Overall, this book was interesting enough to keep me reading but it wasn’t exactly a book that I would read again nor would I recommend this book to any of our regular readers because of the whole cheating bit and then it was a bit of a downer because fate just kept right on shitting on Doreen. More than once while reading I thought, damn enough already! So seriously, I would be hard pressed to recommend this to anyone.

Grade: 2.5 out of 5

This book is available from iUniverse. You can buy it here.