Lucky Us

By: Amy Bloom

Narrated by: Alicyn Packard

Length: 7 hrs and 18 mins

Publisher's Summary

“My father’s wife died. My mother said we should drive down to his place and see what might be in it for us.”

So begins this remarkable novel by Amy Bloom, whose critically acclaimed Away was called “a literary triumph” (The New York Times).

Lucky Us is a brilliantly written, deeply moving, fantastically funny novel of love, heartbreak, and luck.

Disappointed by their families, Iris, the hopeful star, and Eva, the sidekick, journey through 1940s America in search of fame and fortune. Iris’ ambitions take the pair across the America of reinvention in a stolen station wagon, from small-town Ohio to an unexpected and sensuous Hollywood and to the jazz clubs and golden mansions of Long Island.

With their friends in high and low places, Iris and Eva stumble and shine though a landscape of big dreams, scandals, betrayals, and war.

Filled with gorgeous writing, memorable characters, and surprising events, Lucky Us is a thrilling and resonant novel about success and failure, good luck and bad, the creation of a family, and the pleasures and inevitable perils of family life, conventional and otherwise.

From Brooklyn’s beauty parlors to London’s West End, a group of unforgettable people love, lie, cheat, and survive in this story of our fragile, absurd, heroic species.

©2014 Amy Bloom (P)2015 Audible, Ltd

Critic Reviews

“[A] kaleidoscopic take on life in the tumultuous ’40s.... In an exquisitely imagined novel, Amy Bloom wows.... Lucky Us is a tale of a family weathering tragedies intimate and global.” (O: The Oprah Magazine)
“Marvelous picaresque entertainment.... To read Bloom’s fiction is to experience afresh how life is ruled by chance and composed of spare parts that are purposed and repurposed in uncanny ways—it’s a festival of joy and terror and lust and amazement that resolves itself here, warts and all, in a kind of crystalline Mozartean clarity of vision." (Elle)

Uneven, but there's a great story lurking within.

It was a bit too American in style for me to completely enjoy. I found it trying to be clever, not letting the story or characters evolve but purposely make the writing disjointed, as if glimpsed through a opaque framework. This stopped me feeling involved. A shame because there is a cracking story and interpersonal relationships in there, somewhere.