Jackpot Summer by Elyssa Friedland
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Jackpot Summer by Elyssa Friedland

Contemporary fiction

Jackpot Summer

by Elyssa Friedland

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Quick take

Turns out sometimes winning the lottery isn’t so lucky, especially if you’re part of an acrimonious Jersey Shore clan.

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Synopsis

After the Jacobson siblings win a life-changing fortune in the lottery, they assume their messy lives will transform into sleek, storybook perfection—but they couldn’t be more wrong.

The four Jacobson children were raised to respect the value of a dollar. Their mother reused tea bags and refused to pay retail; their father taught them to budget before he taught them to ride a bike. And yet, now that they’re adults, their financial lives are in disarray.

The siblings reunite when their newly widowed father puts their Jersey Shore beach house on the market. Packing up childhood memories isn’t easy, especially when there’s other drama brewing. Matthew is miserable at his corporate law job and wishes he had more time with his son; Laura’s marriage is imploding in spectacular fashion; Sophie’s art career is stalled while her boyfriend’s is on the rise; and Noah’s total failure to launch has him doing tech repair for pennies.

When Noah sees an ad for a Powerball drawing, he and his sisters go in on tickets while their brother Matthew passes. All hell breaks loose when one of the tickets is a winner and three of the four Jacobsons become overnight millionaires. Without their mother’s guidance, and with their father busy playing pickleball in a Florida retirement village, the once close-knit siblings search for comfort in shiny new toys instead of each other.

It’s not long before the Jacobsons start to realize that they’ll never feel rich unless they can pull their family back together.

Read a sample

Get an early look from the first pages of Jackpot Summer.

Jackpot Summer

Los Angeles Times

CALIFORNIA MAN WINS $2B JACKPOT: HOMELESS THREE YEARS LATER

By Macy Roko

Billy Rockwell knows better than anyone what it feels like to go from rags to riches overnight. He’s the winner of the largest jackpot in the country’s history, a whopping $2.3 billion. And for a period of eighteen months, Rockwell was living large. But by the third anniversary of the historic win, the country’s biggest winner was living in a homeless encampment ten miles from his foreclosed Beverly Hills mansion.

“Booze, drugs and women,” Rockwell said, speaking from inside his tent, which he shares with three other homeless individuals. “They will get you every time.” His only remaining possession of value is a rhino horn from Tanzania that he purchased on eBay for $2 million. “It was supposed to bring me luck,” Rockwell said. The horn turned out to be a replica.

Rockwell isn’t alone in falling on hard times after hitting it big. According to the National Endowment for Financial Education, a staggering seventy percent of lottery winners go bankrupt within five years.

“Most winners go hog-wild,” Everett McPherson, an accountant with nationally recognized firm Ernst & Young, said. “And they don’t realize just how large a slice of the pie Uncle Sam is going to take.” McPherson explained that taxes can eat up nearly half the advertised value of the jackpot.

“Billy was no good with money from day one,” his ex‑­wife, Jeannie Rockwell, said. “The Elvis who married us in Vegas swindled him out of three hundred bucks on our wedding night.”

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Past Perfect Life
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Small Fry
Family drama
View all
Land
Summer’s Never Over
The Children
The Lowe Job
The Burning Side
Into the Blue
Porcupines
Lost Lambs
Cursed Daughters
To the Moon and Back
All the Tomorrows After
Finding Grace
Among Friends
These Summer Storms
A Family Matter
The River Is Waiting
Home of the American Circus
The Names
Six Days in Bombay
Wild Dark Shore
A Season of Light
The House of My Mother
What Happened to the McCrays?
Isaac’s Song
Rental House
Dinner for Vampires
Madwoman
Hum
Family Happiness
Incidents Around the House
Same As It Ever Was
Jackpot Summer
The Lion Women of Tehran
Did I Ever Tell You?
Real Americans
Just for the Summer
Hard by a Great Forest
Family Family
Northwoods
Mercury
The Second Chance Year
A Winter in New York
Check & Mate
What We Kept to Ourselves
The Leftover Woman
Evil Eye
Just Another Missing Person
Family Lore
Little Monsters
The Connellys of County Down
Paper Names
Hang the Moon
The Last Russian Doll
Maame
White Horse
The Fortunes of Jaded Women
You're Invited
Part of Your World
The Good Left Undone
The Verifiers
The Unsinkable Greta James
Don't Cry for Me
Black Cake
Olga Dies Dreaming
The Family
The Book of Magic
Crying in H Mart
Sankofa
Apples Never Fall
The Sweetest Remedy
The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina
We Are the Brennans
Skye Falling
Last Summer at the Golden Hotel
Things We Lost to the Water
Libertie
What's Mine and Yours
The Bad Muslim Discount
The Chicken Sisters
In a Holidaze
White Ivy
The Star-Crossed Sisters of Tuscany
Practical Magic
Head Over Heels
The Vanishing Half
All Adults Here
I Have No Secrets
Saving Zoë
Past Perfect Life
There's Something About Sweetie
All That You Leave Behind
Small Fry