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Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers' Favorite
In Ellen Barker’s Lulu in the Loop, twenty-two-year-old Louise “Lulu” Johnson spends the summer in University City, Missouri, living in the apartment of her older sister Novelle, who has left St. Louis for a year-long academic fellowship. Lulu is about to enter her final year at Fontbonne College, but a depleted savings account leaves her needing enough income to cover rent and return to school. She takes a summer job at Automatique, a vending company where she counts thousands of coins inside a locked money room, then picks up evening shifts at a Dairy Queen on Delmar Boulevard. What begins as a plan to rebuild her finances gradually draws Lulu into the neighborhood around the Delmar Loop, where the people she meets open possibilities for the life she might build after graduation.
Ellen Barker’s Lulu in the Loop is a really well-executed coming-of-age novel, and Lulu is a protagonist we want to root for as her business brain follows her everywhere. Barker fleshes her out as someone who instinctively studies how a place functions, then starts thinking about what could make it better. When friends at a communal apartment discuss starting a food co-op, Lulu volunteers to draft its business plan and keeps the meeting moving with a two-minute rule for every point. Barker is excellent with Lulu’s classroom life too. Father O’Malley, the Jesuit priest teaching her required contemporary moral issues course, pushes her thinking into ethics when his oral midterm presents a hiring decision involving a Black applicant whose race is being discussed before her qualifications. Readers who love warm coming-of-age fiction will adore this book.
