Beginners Luck

A train station in Lamy, New Mexico. That's where seventeen-year-old Blake Lennard begins again. Expelled from school and shipped west to his mother Mary, who's already put down roots in Santa Fe's artistic colony, Blake arrives with nothing but a vague sense of failure and an even vaguer sense of what comes next. He doesn't know the city. He doesn't know himself. What he finds are people who might help him figure it out: the eccentric Bob Stuart, the magnetic Teddy Madden, and his own mother, busy discovering her own freedom in the high desert air. Hahn writes with sharp, unsentimental affection for her young protagonist, his restless anger at authority, his awkwardness around women, his dawning sense that the world might be larger than the small towns and smaller expectations that shaped him. This is a novel about the terror and thrill of starting over when you're not even sure what you're starting. Santa Fe isn't just a setting; it's a landscape of possibility, a place where broken young men might remake themselves.