Lotterys Plus One Books in Order

The Lotterys books are middle grade family stories set in Toronto, and they revolve around nine-year-old Sumac Lottery. Sumac lives in a huge, noisy household with six siblings, four parents, and a small crowd of pets in a big old house. The family is mixed in every sense, biological and adopted, culturally varied, and always making up its own rules as it goes.

The fun of this series is the feeling that the house is bursting at the seams, but in a good way.

In The Lotterys Plus One, that cheerful sprawl gets tested when a grandfather with dementia, nicknamed Grumps, comes to live with them. Sumac is the family archivist and worrier, so she feels the strain more than most. She likes order, traditions, and clear roles. Grumps brings confusion, old grief, and a kind of change that cannot be tidied away. The book keeps its humor, but it also takes memory loss seriously and shows how care work lands on everybody in different ways.

Toronto matters here. Donoghue uses the city not just as a backdrop but as part of the series' whole point, a place where many kinds of family, language, faith, and celebration can exist side by side. The Lotterys mark holidays from different traditions, argue over food and fairness, and turn ordinary domestic life into a running festival of inside jokes and last-minute improvisation. The books feel very contemporary, but not in a gadget-heavy way. What lasts is the social texture: neighbors, weather, family rituals, and the daily logistics of living with a lot of other people.

The Lotterys More or Less widens the picture by throwing the family into a brutal winter ice storm. Plans collapse, travel goes wrong, one dad and an older brother get stranded abroad, and the house fills up with one more unexpected guest. The stakes are still child-friendly, but more practical and communal than in many family novels. How do you keep everyone warm, fed, calm, and kind when the lights go out and nothing goes to plan?

That is really the series in miniature.

These are warm books, but they are not sugary. Sumac can be prickly, controlling, and very funny, which keeps the sweetness honest. The ongoing thread is not one giant mystery or cliffhanger. It is the slower question of how a modern family keeps choosing one another through mess, misunderstanding, illness, weather, and ordinary growing up. If you like books that are lively, inclusive, and built around character rather than villains, this series is a very good place to settle in.