Hard Pan Chapter Summaries

This book is a story of a girl named Lucky, the hard times she has faced in her short ten years of life and the ways she has overcome them. The setting of this book is in a town called Hard Pan in the California desert where Lucky has a few friends in the 43-town population; Miles, Lincoln, and Short Sammy. The book starts off with Lucky wanting to get this “higher power” that she overhears a few people talking about in a 12-step meeting in her town; she thinks if she gets this, all her problems will go away because of the stories she hears being told in the museum and visitor center. Lucky has been through what most ten-year-old girls today have not been through. Her mother passed away when she was eight and her father called his ex-wife,

Throughout the chapters in the book, Lucky and her friends talk about many mature things that you wouldn’t expect children at this age to discuss; they also help each other out and talk through everything that is going on in the world and in their own personal lives. After having a lot of worry about this and the thought that came to her head that Brigitte will leave her, Lucky decides to run away with her dog during a bad wind storm. She finds her friend Miles who is hurt from the storm and they go to an abandoned mine. Lincoln then meets up with them and tells them that the townspeople are looking everywhere for them. Brigitte soon finds them and tells Lucky that she has nothing to worry about; she will not abandon Lucky, in fact, wants to stay in Hard Pan with Lucky and open-up a restaurant to support them both. Lucky returns home with Brigitte, she later in the story gets a job cleaning up the outside of the museum and visitor center that the 12-step meeting had taken place, and she is finally okay with Brigitte coming in to live with