Fun fact: she actually used to live like two blocks away from me in small-town Illinois.
Summary: Everybody thinks winning the lottery is impossible. But when Alice buys a lottery ticket as a joke for Teddy's eighteenth birthday, they hit the jackpot. Ever since her parents died a year apart from each other, she hadn't believed in luck. And Teddy's father abandoned him and his mom when his gambling debts brought ruin to their savings. At first, winning the lottery seems to be a saving grace for Teddy's family but when it causes a divide between him and Alice, Alice begins to think it's another form of bad luck.
Firstly, the title of the book, Windfall, is great. Windfall apparently means "an unexpected gain, piece of good fortune, or the like." I never knew this. It's such a cute whimsical title with such a fitting meaning.
I really enjoyed this because it went into how winning the lottery rarely turns out well. Many people end up not spending the money wisely and go bankrupt. It can also cause people to attempt to use and manipulate the winner. For example, Teddy's basketball team convinces him to pay for them all to go to Mexico and still in a beach-house. They also end up maxing out his credit card. It's insane and so rude!
Teddy was also treated differently once he had money. People were more naturally prone to dislike him. He even says that before he won, people always liked him because he was an underdog. They rooted for him to make it. After, people started to meanly gossip behind his back and rooted for him to fail.
It's sad how these things happen, but it's also true. Winning the lottery does not make everything magically perfect. It goes with the saying, "money can't buy happiness." However, Smith also did a good job balancing that with how money sure as heck helps in life. You can do so much when you have money: go to college, donate to charities, help your parents, pay off debts, etc.
The one thing I was not a fan of in this book was the romance. While Teddy was nice, he was also annoying. At least for me, I couldn't get behind the romance. I was all for the friendship and Alice learning to let go of her past and Teddy learning to not let the money go to his head. The romance was not the focus and so I couldn't learn to like it. I like Smith's other cute summer romance books because they're relatively light and it's mainly about the romance in those. I think it would've been much better done with everything staying friendship with the slightest of hints of it developing into a romance later on.
Overall, not my favorite of Jennifer E. Smith's books, but I liked it more in some sense because love wasn't the big meaning of it. I also liked her take on winning the lottery a lot.
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