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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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    Family drama

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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.

Free 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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Why I love it

I can’t think of anything more escapist and delightful than the fantasy of a lotto-win. Instantly all of your problems are solved—smooth sailing ahead. Elyssa Friedland takes a deep dive into that misguided fantasy in her funny and wise summer novel Jackpot Summer.

The four adult Jacobson children were raised to be careful with money, but at the novel’s opening, they are all in various degrees of financial distress. Their recently widowed father announces that he sold their Long Beach Island house, and they need to gather to pack it up over the July 4th weekend. It is while gathered at the beach house that the youngest sibling, Noah, runs out to 7-Eleven and buys a Powerball ticket. Sisters Laura and Sophie throw in, but oldest brother Matthew and his wife think the lotto is for idiots and abstain. But the ticket is a winner and all chaos ensues.

I was sucked into this story from the very beginning. This is the rare novel that hooks you with a fun premise but then keeps you turning pages because the characters feel so real and expertly developed. Jackpot Summer mines every nuance of familial relationships. It left me with a renewed reverence for what matters and put a huge smile on my face.

Member ratings (1,160)

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& Sons
Family drama
View all
The Last One at the Wedding
The Night We Lost Him
Madwoman
Hum
Family Happiness
Husbands & Lovers
Same As It Ever Was
Jackpot Summer
The Lion Women of Tehran
Did I Ever Tell You?
Real Americans
The Reappearance of Rachel Price
Just for the Summer
All We Were Promised
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
While You Were Out
Evil Eye
Just Another Missing Person
Family Lore
Little Monsters
The Connellys of County Down
Lady Tan’s Circle of Women
Paper Names
Divine Rivals
Hang the Moon
The Last Russian Doll
Maame
White Horse
The Family Game
The Fortunes of Jaded Women
When We Were Bright and Beautiful
You're Invited
Marrying the Ketchups
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
Sankofa
Everything We Didn't Say
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 Push
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
The Kingdom of Back
I Have No Secrets
Saving Zoë
Color Me In
Past Perfect Life
Things You Save in a Fire
There's Something About Sweetie
All That You Leave Behind
The Other Woman
Small Fry
The Winter Sister
The Rules of Magic
& Sons