Book Review: Ashley Eckstein Mixes Reality and Fairytale with "Lucky 22"

With Lucky 22, Ashley Eckstein partners with bestselling romance author Samantha Chase to tell a story inspired by Eckstein’s own love story with her husband, former Major League Baseball player David Eckstein. The result is a novel that exists in an unusual space between fiction and autobiography. It is unquestionably a romance novel, complete with meet-cutes, obstacles, grand gestures, and a little bit of magic, but for anyone who has followed Ashley and David Eckstein over the years, it is also an opportunity to experience a familiar story from a very different perspective.

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Lucky 22 follows Ella Rose Holt, an aspiring actress who finds herself on the cusp of taking her career to the next level. Through a series of moments that can perhaps best be described as divine providence, she makes an unexpected connection with Christian Lucas, a Major League Baseball player whose quiet and introverted personality contrasts with the world in which Ella Rose is trying to make her name. Neither is necessarily looking for what the other brings into their life, and pursuing the relationship requires both of them to venture well outside their respective comfort zones. What follows is a journey that is romantic, occasionally complicated, and, appropriately enough for a story inspired by the Ecksteins, a little magical.

For those who have followed Ashley and David’s lives, or who have read David’s autobiography Just Enough, Lucky 22 can sometimes feel a little like an episode of Dragnet: The names have been changed to protect the innocent. The broad strokes of Ella Rose and Christian’s lives track remarkably closely with the portions of Ashley and David’s story that have been shared publicly. The Anaheim Angels become the Anaheim Magic, Walt Disney World becomes Wonder Land, Disney Channel becomes the Storyteller Channel, and Star Wars becomes Galactic Wars. There is a brief adjustment period in which these substitutions can feel a little silly, particularly when the real-world inspirations are so obvious, but eventually your brain begins automatically translating them back into the brands and places they represent.

In fact, recognizing those parallels becomes part of the fun. There is a strange pleasure in encountering a fictionalized version of a moment you already know from the Ecksteins’ lives and seeing how it has been reinterpreted for Ella Rose and Christian. It is not quite an autobiography and certainly should not be treated as one, but it often feels like Ashley has taken the framework of her own experiences and used fiction to explore the emotions behind them. The familiar events provide the skeleton of the story, while the fictional format gives her and Chase the freedom to fill in the emotional spaces between them.

That is ultimately what I found most valuable about Lucky 22. Ashley and David have been fairly open about their relationship over the years, and anyone who has spent time around them can see that, after all these years, they remain madly in love with each other. But seeing a relationship from the outside is very different from understanding what it feels like from within. Through Ella Rose, readers are given something resembling an interior perspective on a story that many Disney and baseball fans have watched unfold for decades.

And that perspective makes Lucky 22 more interesting than simply reading about how two people fell in love. The initial romance is cute, exciting, and filled with the kind of coincidences that would seem overly convenient if they were not inspired by a real relationship. But the book becomes more meaningful when the fairy tale encounters reality. Ella Rose and Christian love each other deeply, but that does not mean everything is easy. Careers create competing demands.. Communication becomes difficult. Expectations do not always match reality. Two people can be completely committed to one another and still have moments when maintaining that relationship takes real work.

That may sound obvious, but it is refreshing to see it presented within a romance that could very easily have stopped at “happily ever after.” Lucky 22 understands that falling in love and building a life with someone are two very different things. The first can feel like magic. The second requires choices, compromises, patience, forgiveness, and occasionally putting someone else’s needs ahead of your own. Importantly, the presence of those struggles is never treated as evidence that Ella Rose and Christian somehow chose the wrong person. Their difficulties are part of the relationship rather than a repudiation of it.

That distinction gives the story a maturity I was not necessarily expecting. The fairy tale is not diminished because it requires effort. If anything, it becomes more meaningful. There is something reassuring about seeing a relationship presented as extraordinary without pretending it is effortless. Even the magical romance needs tending, and perhaps the real magic is that two people continue choosing each other when life becomes more complicated than either anticipated.

Reading Lucky 22 shortly after David Eckstein’s Just Enough made the experience even more rewarding for me. The two books make fascinating companions, offering what feels like a two-person perspective on two lives that eventually became inseparable. David’s book naturally approaches his journey through his experiences, ambitions, setbacks, family, health, and baseball career. Lucky 22, despite being fiction, allows readers to experience echoes of that same period from the other side. Moments that might occupy only a small part of David’s story can carry enormous significance for Ella Rose because she is experiencing them from an entirely different perspective.

The same is true of their careers. Baseball and entertainment are both demanding industries, but they operate in very different ways, and Lucky 22 demonstrates what happens when two people pursuing unusual careers try to build an ordinary life together. Neither person’s dream automatically becomes more important simply because the other person has succeeded. Their ambitions coexist with their relationship, sometimes comfortably and sometimes not. That tension gives Ella Rose an identity beyond simply being the love interest of a professional athlete and helps Christian remain more than the famous baseball player who sweeps her off her feet.

There is also something particularly appropriate about Ashley Eckstein telling this story through fiction. So much of her career has been connected to characters, storytelling, fandom, and the idea that stories can help us better understand ourselves. Lucky 22 essentially turns that idea inward. Instead of simply recounting her life, she and Chase have transformed pieces of it into a story, allowing readers to connect with the emotions without requiring every moment to be treated as a literal historical record.

That does create an interesting question that followed me throughout the book: How much of this actually happened? I frequently found myself wondering whether a particular conversation, argument, gesture, or coincidence came directly from Ashley and David’s relationship or was invented to serve Ella Rose and Christian’s. Ultimately, however, I decided that knowing the answer would probably defeat the purpose. Lucky 22 is presented as fiction, and Ella Rose and Christian deserve to exist as characters rather than merely as aliases for their real-world counterparts.

Still, the specificity of the story makes it difficult not to believe that there is a great deal of emotional truth underneath the fictional details. I may never know precisely where Ashley and David end and Ella Rose and Christian begin, but I chose to believe in Ella and Christian’s story. Then again, I am a Disney fan. Believing in a little magic comes with the territory.

I am not a regular reader of romance novels, so I cannot tell you where Lucky 22 fits within the conventions of the genre. What I can say is that I thoroughly enjoyed it as the retelling of a romance Disney fans have been following for decades. There is an undeniable novelty in recognizing the people, places, and events hiding behind fictional names, but the book ultimately offers more than a game of identifying its real-life inspirations. It is a story about what happens after two people find each other and discover that finding your person does not automatically make everything else simple.

Perhaps that is the most romantic thing about Lucky 22. It does not suggest that true love eliminates struggle. Instead, it argues that love can be strong enough to survive struggle, provided both people remain willing to do the work. The coincidences that bring Ella Rose and Christian together may feel like fate, divine providence, or even a little Disney magic, but staying together is a choice they have to keep making.

Ashley and David Eckstein have shared pieces of their story with fans for years, but Lucky 22 offers an opportunity to see that story through a new lens. I appreciate the openness with which Ashley Eckstein appears to have approached the novel, particularly because she does not present a perfect relationship so much as a loving one. There is a meaningful difference between the two. The fairy tale is still there, but so are the compromises, frustrations, sacrifices, laughter, and work that come with building a life together.

For a book called Lucky 22, that may be its most important lesson. Luck might help two people find each other, but it takes much more than luck to make a love story last.