Jackpot by Nic Stone

 

Welcome Back Booklovers! I wanted to post my review here since I've seen people mention this on their TBR and I've seen reviews but I haven't come across critical reviews of it. And there was some stuff in this book I felt needed to be addressed. 

So Jackpot follows Rico, a high school senior and part time gas station worker . Because of her background she feels really disconnected to the people at her school and has no plans after graduation beyond working full time at the gas station. One day at work Rico finds out she sold a winning lottery ticket at her station and she becomes obsessed with tracking down the old lady she believes has it and claiming the money for herself. She enlists classmate Zan to track this woman down.  It becomes a YA Cinderella of sorts where the poor girl is swept off her feet by the rich white dude with the Peter Kavingsky style charm who picks her up and drops her off from work every day. He helps her get out of her aloof shell and make some real friends at school. 

Jackpot's strengths lie in it's ability to sell you the teen romance. The leading characters do have nice chemistry and you follow them as they bond on this little adventure tracking down the missing ticket. And if it was just trying to sell the teen romance with minor conflict it would've been fine. She's not like other girls and he's the snarky somewhat bad boy everyone adores. But I found this book tried to straddle the line by being portrayed as a very socially conscious book while also trying to be a cute YA romance. But the social aspects are written so surface level it doesn't balance out. And at times Zan comes across very white savior in the relationship.

Much of the narrative harps on how poor her family is. And honestly it was exhausting because it never fully dove into a real conversation about poverty. Rico's mother has them living in a low income apartment in a neighborhood/school district they can't really afford. Many teens have to work part time to help make ends meet and that's not a problem. The problem I had was that Rico's mother claims they live in the area they do because she wants her children to go to good schools but constantly forces Rico to skip school to work long hours at the gas station. She puts a lot of pressure on Rico to take care of the family and really could care less about the school since she's not pushing Rico to do well to earn scholarships or be able to further her education. 

Rico's mother has colitis and she can't afford good health insurance. So instead of going to apply for Medicaid for herself and Chip for the children she decides instead they must suffer until they're at risk of death. And her reasoning is she doesn't want government handouts. Even though our tax dollars help fund these government programs. I felt there was a missed opportunity to discuss the resources available that our funded through our tax paying dollars where instead of Rico's mother just outright refuses to enroll in these programs it could've been mentioned how she made above the threshold to qualify for some of them. Because even in my own family there were times when we were struggling but still making too much money to qualify for programs like SNAP.  Where was the mention of The Affordable Care Act. 

Though Rico does call her out at least once during the course of this story there was nothing in the text to show why her mentality is wrong and harmful to her children. I needed an adult character to knock some sense into her but that never happened. And her actions towards her children when it came to their health and well being were actually toxic but again that's never addressed and handwaved multiple times. 

And even the way race was handled in this story at times was a little awkward. Zan asks Rico what she is ethnically and there's a whole teachable moment about Blackness by society standards and assuming people are mixed because of curly hair and high cheekbones. And this would've been a great opportunity to hit him with a "I'm Black mixed with Black" type response but instead Rico calls herself a mutt and goes into being confused about her race because her mother was raised by a single white father and not much is known about Rico's dad. And I proceeded to role my eyes after that. Later on in the story Zan is revealed to have a Mexican grandparent and Rico asks him if he's biracial. Even though Mexican is not a race this suddenly changes Zan's family from being seen as the stereotype rich white family to more ethnic. Zan's not white white he's spicy white.

A little more substance would've elevated this book and it had potential to be a great conversation starter.