Rating: ☻☻☻☻☺

In short, Windfall is about a girl named Alice who one day decides to buy a lottery ticket as a birthday gift for her best friend Teddy, who she is secretly in love with. This gift turns out to be much more than she bargained for. It is one of the winning tickets of a multi-million dollar lottery, and her friend is transported to fame. The book follows her journey as she deals with her best friend’s fame, college acceptances, her grief over her parents’ deaths, and finds out who she really is and wants to be. 
When I first read the description of the story, I honestly wasn’t too keen on picking it up, but for some reason, I decided to try a few chapters, and I was immediately hooked.  

What I love about this story is that there’s so much more to it than the cliché “girl is in love with her lifelong best friend and spends the entire book trying to make him realize that he’s in love with her too.” Alice’s character was really unique and eye-opening for me, especially with her viewpoint of the world after both her parents were taken away from her at such a young age. The novel really made me think about the struggles that other people my age have to go through, and also made me deeply appreciate my life.

This is personally one of my favorite things about reading, and one of the many reasons I think reading is important–books give us insight into worlds that are completely unfamiliar , but we can grow to understand and appreciate them. Even if the book is a work of fiction, like this one, it doesn’t mean that you can’t learn something about humanity that makes you a more compassionate and knowledgeable person. With that, and without getting into spoilers, I want to encourage everyone reading to pick up this book if you get the chance. Windfall is far from an ordinary young adult contemporary, and even if you aren’t a fan of the genre, it is something I would wholeheartedly recommend.

​Thank you so much for reading, and feel free to comment below to discuss the book! Please copy and paste the following header if you will be posting any spoilers:
********************
* Spoilers Ahead! * 
********************

<3, g